In the United States, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) works as an online tool where suspected adverse reactions to vaccines can be reported. VAERS is public and monitored and updated weekly by the CDC.
However, people checking VAERS for reports on the COVID-19 vaccines have noticed that the weekly updates are backlogged by months. On Twitter, Alex Berenson noted that it had taken until the end of April for the CDC to respond to a report from January — indicating that VAERS not only is seriously backlogged, but may not be reflecting the true numbers of adverse reactions being reported to the COVID vaccines in real time.
This is important to know since the system’s primary goal is to “detect new, unusual or rare vaccine adverse events” as a way to monitor safety of vaccines.
A backlog by months not only indicates that quite possibly there are so many reports coming in that that the CDC can’t handle them, but it very well could prevent the CDC from performing its job of performing that primary goal.