GRASSMONSTER SAYS:

By Zvorxes Seer

The UK Yellow Card System
A History of Warnings Ignored

Medical Disclaimer:
The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. The content reflects the author’s views and should not be construed as a substitute for professional healthcare guidance. Always consult a qualified medical professional (such as your physician, pharmacist, or other licensed healthcare provider) before making any decisions regarding vaccinations or medical treatments. Reliance on any information in this article is solely at your own risk.

There exists in the sepulchral filing cabinets of British medicine a thing called the Yellow Card Scheme – a kind of postal confession box for when pharmaceuticals get frisky. It is not yellow, nor is it a card. It is, rather, a digital suggestion box with the gravity of a courtroom and the visibility of a black hole. Conceived in the 1960s after the thalidomide tragedy – a scandal so grotesque that even Fleet Street put down its cigars – the Yellow Card system was supposed to warn us. About anything. Side effects, adverse reactions, things that go bump in your bloodstream.

What it has become is something else: a digital oubliette. Thousands of citizens report their ailments, trembling through screens with faith that someone, somewhere, is actually reading it. And technically – someone is. But whether they’re listening is another matter altogether. It’s like yelling through a megaphone into a Ministry corridor and hearing only the echo of “no known safety signals.”

Enter Covid-19 – the grand disruptor, the bureaucratic bulldozer that flattened everything from moral discourse to the right to attend your gran’s funeral. The vaccines arrived not with a whisper, but with orchestras, fireworks, and Cabinet Office press releases straining at the seams with Churchillian solemnity. Never had “taking the jab” sounded so much like “doing your duty for Queen and country.”

And with that patriotic surge came a torrent of Yellow Card submissions. Reports flooded in, thousands upon thousands – from mild soreness to neurological spasms that could shake the Queen’s china loose. Yet, curiously, this wasn’t headline news. The MHRA, in its saintly detachment, quietly updated the public on a website that looks like it was designed by a narcoleptic tax officer in 2007.

We were told: “The benefits outweigh the risks.” Which, on the surface, is an agreeable statement – if you’re at sea with a shark. But as early as Spring 2021, the Yellow Card data was blinking like a warning light on a burning dashboard, and nobody seemed inclined to pull over. Instead, the narrative was meticulously lacquered in “safe and effective” varnish so thick, you could skate on it.

But was this historic pharmacovigilance tool genuinely used in good faith? Or did it become – as with many bureaucratic tools – an elegant fig leaf to justify inaction and suppress awkward questions? In Part 2, we will unpick the entrails of those early reports, and see if they indeed screamed what no one dared to hear.

Part 2: Jab and Tell – What the Early Reports Really Said

It takes a particular strain of bureaucratic alchemy to turn raw human suffering into statistical mulch, but the MHRA – bless them – managed it with aplomb. From January 2021, the Yellow Card system began recording adverse reactions to the newly authorised Covid-19 vaccines, many submitted by patients themselves, some by GPs, and a generous handful by nurses too exhausted to argue with reality. And what did these brave missives from the frontline say?

They said: “Heart palpitations.” They said: “Numbness, vertigo, Bell’s palsy.” They said: “My menstrual cycle has been rearranged by Kafka.” They screamed in pharmacoepidemiological English: “Something is not quite right.” But the MHRA, armed with its Excel spreadsheets and Olympic detachment, reassured the public with the vigour of a mortician downplaying rigor mortis.

By March 2021, more than 250,000 Yellow Card reports had been submitted. The weekly updates (painfully buried several clicks deep on gov.uk) featured dry numerical summaries, the kind that would bore a tribunal to sleep. They listed by vaccine brand – Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna – and divided the carnage into organ systems: “Cardiac disorders,” “Nervous system disorders,” “Reproductive system and breast disorders.” A symphony of system failures neatly categorised for your viewing discomfort.

But here’s the rub: no thresholds were established for triggering a review. There was no defined “stop point” – no number of deaths, no rate of adverse events that would pause the rollout, even temporarily. In an Orwellian twist, each new batch of troubling data became, not a red flag, but an opportunity to restate the mantra: “No new safety concerns identified.”

What, then, did the early Yellow Cards really say? They said we were guinea pigs. Not by conspiracy, necessarily – but by omission, negligence, and the cowardice of institutional language. The public wanted answers. Instead, we were given risk-benefit diagrams and the kind of statistical gymnastics that would make a Pfizer compliance officer blush.

Part 3: Silence is Golden – Media, MHRA, and the Case for Discretion

If a vaccine triggers a thousand tremors and no journalist prints it, does it make a sound? By the summer of 2021, the Yellow Card reports were a cacophony of concern, echoing across GP clinics, disability forums, and whistleblower subreddits. Yet BBC News</strong, the Guardian, and their metropolitan kin maintained a curious silence. The kind one normally associates with non-disclosure agreements or the final moments before a scandal breaks – except it didn’t break. It stalled, like a conversation no one was brave enough to finish.

The mainstream media had assumed the role of national hypnotist, repeating the phrase “safe and effective” until the public began reciting it in their sleep. Reports of clotting, myocarditis, neurological disorders and fertility concerns were quickly quarantined in the “misinformation” column. Any journalist foolish enough to entertain adverse data was labelled reckless, conspiratorial, or – most damning of all – “anti-vax adjacent.”

Even the MHRA, the body tasked with pharmacovigilance, began to sound less like a watchdog and more like a tranquilised beagle. Its press briefings had all the vivacity of an undertaker reading actuarial tables. No investigative deep-dives. No bold inquiry from the fourth estate. The collective motto became: “Do not alarm the herd.”

There were exceptions, of course. A handful of brave doctors wrote open letters. One or two minor outlets dared to publish summaries of the data – but they were swiftly met with Ofcom inquiries, Twitter bans, or polite derision by academic gatekeepers. Fact-checkers, those unpaid interns of Big Credibility, kept busy reciting government lines with religious fervour, often confusing context for contradiction.

So, was it censorship? Not in the brutish, jackbooted sense. No doors were kicked in, no printing presses burned. But something more British occurred – a kind of institutional gaslighting, wherein reality was massaged until it resembled state-sanctioned optimism. Doubts were reframed as threats. And truth became not a matter of data, but of tone.

Part 4: Data Dump or Data Disguise?

By mid-2022, the MHRA had committed itself to the digital equivalent of a bureaucratic smokescreen – not by altering data, but by avalanche. Inundate the public with so much technical detail, footnoted obscurity, and unreconciled categories that even a pharmacologist would need a sabbatical to decode it. It was a masterpiece of opacity by excess.

The Yellow Card reports, now numbering over 1.5 million entries, had been chopped into weekly updates, then into vaccine brands, then subdivided into adverse reaction types, then diluted into outcome categories: “fatal”, “serious”, “non-serious”, “under review”. All of which sounds reassuring – until you realised the MHRA had not provided full-line patient records or outcomes past initial reporting. The public saw the onset, never the aftermath.

For example, the AstraZeneca vaccine – the pride of post-Brexit pharmacological nationalism – had early signals of clotting events by February 2021. Yet the term “Vaccine-Induced Thrombotic Thrombocytopenia” (VITT) only entered the official lexicon months later. Until then, it was a trickle of “suspected embolisms” and “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis” – terms as digestible to the public as the Book of Numbers in its original Aramaic.

And what of the deaths? By October 2021, the MHRA had quietly logged over 1,800 fatalities in Yellow Card reports. But the framing was delicate: each entry was peppered with disclaimers such as “Temporal association does not imply causation” and “Underlying health conditions cannot be ruled out.” A valid statement – and yet one never applied with equal caution to the mortality figures for Covid itself.

In short, the data was technically public, but functionally buried. There was no national briefing. No press conference slides. No sober public debate. Instead, we had “transparency theatre”: PDFs released with the enthusiasm of a dentist handing over a root canal bill.

In Part 5, we’ll peer into the dusty cabinets of Freedom of Information requests – and discover what was left out, redacted, or quietly vanished from view.

Part 5: The Curious Case of FOIs and Missing Pages

For those masochistic enough to file a Freedom of Information request in Britain, there exists a unique thrill in the anticipation of state-curated disappointment. The MHRA’s FOI responses on Yellow Card data were no exception – they read like polite refusals wrapped in bureaucratic origami. Questions about fatality breakdowns, age-specific risks, and cross-tabulated comorbidities were met with that most British of evasions: “This information is not held in a format suitable for release.”

When campaigners asked for a full list of fatalities by brand and age group, they received either heavily redacted PDFs or links to already-published summary data. Any request for raw patient-level data – anonymised or not – was treated with suspicion bordering on paranoia, often citing GDPR, resource limits, or the amorphous spectre of “public misinterpretation.”

Even MPs attempting to probe deeper – a rare breed since most had long outsourced their courage to party whips – found themselves tangled in ministerial non-speak. Parliamentary questions submitted in 2022 and 2023 asking about Yellow Card deaths, fertility anomalies, or underreporting rates were met with one of three responses: deferral to the MHRA, vague promises of “ongoing review,” or the classic: “The benefits of the vaccine continue to outweigh the risks.”

But here’s the kicker. In a quietly released MHRA risk analysis document dated late 2021, a footnote referenced internal advisory group minutes discussing underreporting multipliers. The page it referred to, however, was nowhere to be found. Vanished. Mislinked. “Withdrawn pending review.” One investigator (whose name shall remain conveniently redacted) noted the document had once been live – but was replaced days later with a version omitting the controversial section.

Now, a vanishing hyperlink is not proof of a cover-up. But when documents change after FOIs are filed – and when transparency offices take 6 months to decline requests that ought to take a lunch break – one might be forgiven for suspecting more than just digital housekeeping.

In Part 6, the finale, we ask the ultimate question: was any of this – the delay, the silence, the evasions – accidental, or was it deliberate? What does “hidden” really mean in the age of performative transparency?

Part 6: Was it Hidden? Was it Deliberate? A Nation Deserves the Answer

There is a difference – subtle, sly, and sickening – between not knowing and not wanting to know. The British public were never explicitly lied to about the Yellow Card reports. Instead, they were nudged, fogged, delayed, redirected, and patronised. The MHRA published, yes – but without amplification. Ministers spoke, yes – but only in pre-chewed slogans. The press, ever obedient in crisis, found its teeth dulled by state-sanctioned sedation.

So was the Yellow Card data “hidden”? No. It was buried alive. And as any gravedigger will tell you, that’s a form of murder with plausible deniability. The data was there – in cold spreadsheets, in obscure corners of gov.uk, wrapped in euphemisms and asterisks – but it required effort, context, and a lack of fear to read it. And that, more than any sinister cabal or lab-coated villain, was the real scandal: a culture that feared the truth would destabilise the narrative, so it chose not to tell it.

The result? A battered public, confused and suspicious, left to fill the silence with conspiracy, folklore, and TikTok doomscrolls. Millions obeyed, many suffered, few were ever heard. And when the real history of the Covid years is written – by someone unafraid of polite society – the Yellow Card system may well be remembered as the quiet ledger of state cowardice.

And if it was deliberate – if those responsible for the concealment, minimisation, or discrediting of valid safety concerns ever face scrutiny – then the British public, still paying for all this in taxes and trauma, should demand not just accountability… but an apology.

The MHRA clarifies that a Yellow Card report is not proof of causation.

These reports merely signal the need for further safety analysis.
MHRA’s July 2025 Yellow Card logged reports – view the breakdown here.

Author – @grassmonster

Keywords: was Yellow Card report hidden, UK vaccine side effect transparency, MHRA accountability Covid-19, deliberate data suppression vaccines, public inquiry vaccine safety

Hashtags: #YellowCardTruth #CovidAccountability #MHRAWatchdog #VaccineDataUK #HealthTransparency #GrassmonsterInvestigates

Disclaimer: This article is a satirical and investigative commentary based on publicly available information, government records, and official data from the MHRA Yellow Card scheme. It raises questions in the public interest and does not assert or imply unlawful conduct unless verified through reliable sources. Where speculation or rhetorical questioning occurs, it is presented as protected opinion under UK and US free expression laws. Readers are encouraged to consult official health guidance for medical decisions. No medical advice is given. All punctuation and formatting follow GRASSMONSTER editorial standards.

References

UK Government: MHRA Yellow Card Covid-19 Vaccine Reports
What Do They Know – FOI Portal for MHRA Vaccine Safety Requests
Hansard UK Parliament – Vaccine Safety Written Questions 2021–2024
BMJ Investigations: Covid-19 Vaccine Surveillance and Reporting Concerns
Office for National Statistics (ONS): Excess Mortality and Vaccine Outcomes

Health & Data Disclaimer

Journalistic context. This article is an opinion-based commentary and contains satirical rhetoric. It interprets public records—including the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Yellow Card scheme—through the author’s personal lens.
Authoritative position. The MHRA’s own weekly safety summaries state that “the overall safety profile of the COVID-19 vaccines remains positive and the benefits outweigh any known risks” GOV.UK. UK NHS guidance and the World Health Organization likewise advise that vaccination is the safest and most effective measure to prevent severe COVID-19 illness and death nhs.ukWorld Health Organization.
Limits of Yellow Card data. Yellow Card reports list suspected adverse events; submission alone does not prove that a vaccine caused the outcome coronavirus-yellowcard.mhra.gov.uk. Figures are subject to ongoing review, correction and contextual analysis by regulators.
No medical advice. Nothing in this post is intended, or should be interpreted, as medical, diagnostic or treatment advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional about vaccination or any health decision.
Reader responsibility. By continuing you acknowledge that:
- The content may contain speculative questions presented for debate and public-interest inquiry.
- Official sources (MHRA, NHS, WHO) should be your primary reference for up-to-date vaccine safety information.
- You understand that the author’s views do not necessarily reflect those of regulators, publishers, advertisers or Google.