Steven Rubin, and his wife Amy Lansky are both Ph.D. top-notch computer programmers. They acquired all of the VAERS data from the years 1990 to 2000 (2001 data is available but incomplete, so I have ignored it for now).
He found that the data for each year are split into two files: one has all of the main records with events, symptoms, vaccinations, etc. The second file gives further details on the particular vaccinations given (such as manufacturer, lot number, etc.)
He wrote a program to read all of the files and merge them into a single "Microsoft Access" database. He posted this database to the web so that anyone can download it.
Each record of the database is a single VAERS event, and it has all of the information in it (symptoms, vaccinations, manufacturer, lot number, etc.) Access has a query language that can be used to search this database. In addition, it can export its data to other database systems.
The full 11-year database is about 56 megabytes, but on the web, it is compressed into a 20 megabyte file. You can get it at:
http://www.whale.to/zip/VAERSDB.zip
If you wish to see a sample record, look here:
http://www.std.org/strubin/SampleVAERS.gif
Some things to note about this database:
The symptom text is a long paragraph describing the symptoms for each event. "Access" limits such text fields to 256 characters, but starting in 1998, some of these paragraphs were longer than that. By the year 2000, the paragraphs were as long as 520 characters. In my database, all of these paragraphs are truncated to 256 characters.