The latest UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance report was released Thursday, and its authors are now bending over backwards to keep their critics happy. Following a telling-off this week from the U.K. Statistics Authority, the UKHSA’s Head of Immunisation, Mary Ramsay (pictured above), published a blog post explaining what they’ve done to appease their detractors, while the report now states no fewer than four times, twice in bold typeface, that “these raw data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness”. Ramsay grovels:
To make our data less susceptible to misinterpretation, the U.K. Health Security Agency has worked with the UK Statistics Authority to update some of the data tables and descriptions in the report, specifically around rates of infection in vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. In our commitment to transparent and clear data, we regularly review our publications to ensure they reflect the current situation within the pandemic, and we will continue to work with our partners at the statistics bodies, to ensure our reporting is as scientifically robust as possible.
As I noted last week, the UKHSA does not accept the criticism of its population estimates levelled by, among others, David Spiegelhalter, who declared that using them was “deeply untrustworthy and completely unacceptable”.
The agency instead takes the view that the problem is systemic biases in the data which mean it “should not be used” to estimate vaccine effectiveness. But as I have noted repeatedly, those biases just mean that the estimate will be of unadjusted vaccine effectiveness, which is a perfectly legitimate quantity to estimate and has its uses, particularly when looking at trends or when there is reason to think the biases may be relatively small. (For instance, a recent vaccine effectiveness study in California adjusted its raw data for 22 different factors but in almost all cases the adjustments were tiny.)
The UKHSA report itself correctly gives the definition of vaccine effectiveness: “Vaccine effectiveness is estimated by comparing rates of disease in vaccinated individuals to rates in unvaccinated individuals.” The U.S. CDC, likewise, states the definition as “the proportionate reduction in disease among the vaccinated group”. The CDC distinguishes “vaccine efficacy”, estimated from controlled studies, from “vaccine effectiveness”, which is used “when a study is carried out under typical field (that is, less than perfectly controlled) conditions”. It is therefore not appropriate for the UKHSA, a Government agency, to insist that its data “should not be used” to estimate vaccine effectiveness, which is a false statement and amounts to attempted Government censorship of scientific enquiry.
The report explains that “vaccine effectiveness is measured in other ways as detailed in the ‘Vaccine Effectiveness’ Section.” However, that section is clear that each estimate “typically applies for at least the first three to four months after vaccination”, and “there may be waning of effectiveness beyond this point”. The report discusses this waning, but only for the Alpha variant: “Data (based primarily on the Alpha variant) suggest that in most clinical risk groups, immune response to vaccination is maintained and high levels of VE are seen with both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.” What use is data based primarily on the Alpha variant, which went almost extinct around six months ago? There is no attempt to present adjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness based on the most up-to-date data. Instead, we are just given repeated insistences that the data is not showing what it appears to be showing because it is subject to unquantified biases.
What are those biases? Last week the report claimed that vaccinated people “may engage in more social interactions because of their vaccination status”, which didn’t fit with the more usual idea of unvaccinated people as a less cautious sort. Neither did it fit with the other reason they gave, that the vaccinated “may be more health conscious and therefore more likely to get tested for COVID-19”. This week they kept the latter but changed the former to the entirely ambiguous: “People who are fully vaccinated and people who are unvaccinated may behave differently, particularly with regard to social interactions.”
The other two biases they suggest are that “many of those who were at the head of the queue for vaccination are those at higher risk from COVID-19” and “people who have never been vaccinated are more likely to have caught COVID-19” previously. (The latter they say gives a person “some natural immunity to the virus for a few months”, which seems a very pessimistic view of natural immunity, particularly seeing how optimistic they are about the effectiveness of the vaccines.)
The report asserts categorically that the unvaccinated have higher previous infection rates, but cites no evidence to support this. Why not? Why, almost a year into the vaccination campaign, are researchers still so often waving their hands when talking about the differences between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups? Where is the published data? Precisely how much more likely are the unvaccinated to have had a previous infection? This is a simple data comparison. Why hasn’t it been done? The study in California mentioned earlier found that 2% of the vaccinated had recovered from Covid against 2.3% of the unvaccinated, so not a large difference. Is England similar? Why don’t we know? Likewise, how much more likely are vaccinated people to be tested? This is just a comparison of the testing rates in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Why hasn’t it been done? This is not good enough. We want more data from UKHSA, not lectures on how not to use the meagre amounts of data they release.
In her blog post, Mary Ramsay points to studies PHE (UKHSA’s predecessor) has published in the past:
These factors are all accounted for in our published analyses of vaccine effectiveness which uses the test-negative case control approach. This is a recommended method of assessing vaccine effectiveness that compares the vaccination status of people who test positive for COVID-19, with those who test negative.
This method helps to control for different propensity to have a test and we are able to exclude those known to have been previously infected with COVID-19. We also control for important factors including geography, time period, ethnicity, clinical risk group, living in a care home and being a health or social care worker.
While PHE did publish such studies earlier in the year (I analyse them here and here), they have not published anything based on data more recent than May, over five months ago. This was just as Delta arrived, and before infections surged over the summer and the raw data started showing infections in the vaccinated eclipsing those in the unvaccinated.
So where is the update? It’s all very well writing pages at the behest of the U.K. Statistics Authority policing how people use your data, but where are the studies setting the picture straight? We’ve had studies from California, Sweden and Israel using data from over the summer, all showing sharp decline in vaccine effectiveness. Where is the U.K.’s contribution to this emerging understanding of the vaccines?
Yes, we had that dubious study in August from Oxford University based on the ONS Infection Survey. But there’s been no update from UKHSA to its studies based on Government testing data.
Here’s a suggestion. Why don’t Daily Sceptic readers write a (polite!) email to the UKHSA’s Mary Ramsay (address here, Twitter here) asking for an update on their very useful test-negative case control study with data from the summer and autumn. You might say you have been concerned about the data in their Vaccine Surveillance reports showing high infection rates in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated, but note they say vaccine effectiveness can only be properly estimated in a study, so would be grateful for an update on this.
Here’s this week’s table of unadjusted vaccine effectiveness and the updated graphs showing how it is changing over time. It shows infection rates currently twice as high in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated for those aged 40-79, corresponding to an unadjusted vaccine effectiveness of minus-100% or more. Vaccine effectiveness is negative for all over-30s, and almost zero for those aged 18-29 (and still declining). It remains high for under-18s, and effectiveness against hospital admission and death is holding up. This week the decline appears to have stopped, or at least paused, in most age groups.
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There seems to be a trend going on and it starts to make the situation a decade ago look like the outlier.
In the article, it says, “…but the Greenland ice sheet may have made a net gain in size in the year to August 2022.”, but in the source quoted, the opening paragraph states,
“The end of the northern-hemisphere summer brings to a close the Greenland ice sheet melt season and with it confirmation that 2022 was the 26th year in a row where Greenland lost ice overall.”
Surely net and overall mean the same thing?
Can someone please tell me what I failed to see…
Greenland gains mass every year. The melt season is just over 2 months long, while the ‘mass gain’ season is 10 months long. The graph from the DMI always ends higher than at the start and then the graph starts again each year. So there is a constant flow of ice off Greenland because there is a near constant dumping of snow. In 1942 a P38 Lightning crash landed on the Greenland Ice sheet and in 1992 she was brought to the surface having been buried under 268 feet of ice. Incidentally, research into the age of the ice cannot find much ice dating from before the last inter glacial, the Eemian, which was 120,000 years ago and hotter than the Holocene.
In addition. The assertion that Greenland is losing mass has been derived from models – need I say (write) more?
Thanks for replying; but I still don’t understand why the above article says the opposite to the article quoted.
When you say that “the assertion that Greenland …derived from models“, do you mean that they use models when talking about the last 26 years?
It says “the Greenland ice sheet lost 84Gt of ice over the 12 months from September 2021 to August 2022.” Surely the 84Gt figure is not derived from a model.
I’m not an espert, and only recently became a sceptic: I’m just trying to understand.
I don’t know how they come to that conclusion because according to polarportal.dk Greenland gained 600 Gt from Sept 21 and up to June, and then lost 150 Gt between June and Sept 2022 – Overall a gain of 450 Gt.
Please see Tony Heller on Youtube such as the following “Extreme Melt In Greenland” – “Scientists Cherry Picking In Greenland”
Thanks for taking the time to reply
SILENCE———There is a “Climate Emergency” and that is all there is to it. The BBC says so. The Daily Climate Show on SKY NEWS says so and that should be good enough for everyone so go and enjoy your Netflix and Coronation Street because there is a “Climate Crisis” and everything you do needs to stop to avert it. Soon you won’t have any notes in your wallet, and your spending will be monitored to make sure you have not exceeded your carbon footprint limits. ——Wakey Wakey people. You are being played. ————–“Climate Emergency” is political speak masquerading as science.
It’s children that are the most vocal about the ‘Climate Emergency’ and ‘Climate Crimes’.
“I’m not young enough to know everything” – J. M Barrie
“Every fourth euro spent within the EU budget will go towards action to mitigate climate change… I am glad to see that young people are taking to the streets in Europe to raise visibility of the issue of climate change.” – Jean-Claude Juncker
And children who are most susceptible to propaganda.
Yes, and the tyrants know this:
“And to anyone who still disagrees with me, I say that you no longer matter. We are now educating your children.” – A. H.
Ooh, Germany’s reopening an opencast coalmine (Nigel Farage, GB News).
Taking the Chinese and the Ukrainian route are they? Meanwhile, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland bans fracking. Hmm…
Germany has a choice: start behaving sensibly or watch their manufacturing sector disappear.
They’ve chosen sense.
Much as its good news to hear that the planet does actually know best, the so called climate emergency is just a ruse to sweep away our society and replace it with communism. If the ice sheets were 50 metres thicker, it wouldn’t matter one jot…
The Vikings gave Greenland it’s name for a good reason; it was Green, and warm enough to grow crops. Climate crisis is a globalist scam.
Many thanks Chris. Keep it up.
No, no this cannot be true. St David of Attenborough hasn’t made mention of this!!
Another great article, Chris. If only we could get you on the MSM to show the masses they’re being duped.
If you’ve got about 38 billion pounds…