Essentially yes, as laymen VARES is useless. VARES reports are useful for scientist to identify things to study. The useful data comes out of the peer reviewed studies that the VARES report spawn, not the reports themselves. They're simply datapoints that need to be taken in conjunction with the rest of the inputs to the study and you can not extract meaningful conclusions from them alone.

They're as useful as looking at only 1-star product reviews that don't even verify the submitter owns the product.

John's Hopkins has a good overview of their intended use: https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/what-vaers-is-and-isnt

> Moreover, the CDC and FDA do not restrict what people can report, as long as it happened at some point following a vaccination. That means events that happen even years later and have no obvious connection to a vaccine, such as feelings of anger, end up reported in the system