Thalidomide was never approved in the US. And VAERS is self reporting, not confirmed data. But acknowledging that would spoil a good kook story so carry on.
You are wrong on all counts. But I guess you need to post in this way to support your point of view with no attempt to achieve accuracy or add to general knowledge.
Your point about VAERS is a non point. It has always been self reported, predominately by clinicians. It has been historically viewed as vastly underreported and this is still the case. The numbers are therefor comparable to the decades of reported vaccine injuries from other agents. In the past agents have been removed from the market with small numbers of VAERS reported deaths.
Thalidomide was on the route to distribution in the USA when the German thalidomide crisis emerged and the application was quietly withdrawn.
https://usthalidomide.org/our-story-thalidomide-babies-us/
In April 1962, the FDA finally revealed that thalidomide had been distributed widely as samples in a clinical trial. Even then, the information was treated as a minor event in American newspapers, apparently because the FDA said no women who took the medication had so far delivered a baby with birth defects. They were wrong.
Details emerged over the coming months and in early August 1962, newspapers reported that Richardson Merrell distributed more than 2.5 million doses of thalidomide to more than 1,200 U.S. doctors. By the time the company filed the NDA, its clinical trial had evolved into an unauthorized marketing program.
In spite of an FDA rule prohibiting drug companies from distributing marketing materials before the NDA was approved, Richardson Merrell promoted the samples as a safer alternative to other sedatives. Company executives believed the drug would be approved by November 1960. They hoped to advance awareness of the new tranquilizer and maximize the number of prescriptions written during the most anxious time of the year: the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
According to an internal FDA memo dated October 2, 1962, the “Manual” used by salesmen “shows that the doctor was provided with information assuring him of the safety of the drug and reveals the presence of a physician’s sample promotion scheme rather than a bonafide investigational program.”
FDA records obtained by a survivor through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request in 2011 also document that German pharmaceutical company Chemie Grünenthal (now known as Grünenthal) licensed American companies Smith Kline and French (now GlaxoSmithKline) to manufacture thalidomide from 1956-1958 and Richardson-Merrell (now Sanofi), to produce it from 1958-1962.
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Through social media, dozens of thalidomide survivors born in the U.S. began finding each other in 2016. When a small group of us gathered for a weekend two years later, it was a shock to meet others who shared our life experience. (Read about that meeting.)