We’re publishing a guest post by a blogger calling himself “eugyppius” about the frantic attempts by the UKHSA to renounce its own data showing infection rates are higher in the vaccinated than they are in the unvaccinated. This post was originally published on eugyppius’s Substack account, which you can subscribe to here. Highly recommended.
Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated case rates in the United Kingdom, from the latest U.K. Health Security Agency vaccine surveillance report:
Yet again I had to draw this graph myself, and yet again, the U.K. Health Security Agency wants you to know that these rates are extremely, totally, absolutely unadjusted. They just don’t know precisely why or how.
As I noted on Twitter, it’s emerged that UKHSA inserted all of their ill-advised disclaimers after coming under fire from the Office of Statistics Regulation, a regulatory body which periodically complains about statistics published by the British Government.
OSR director Ed Humpherson met with UKHSA hours before they published their Week 43 report, demanding they do something about these awkward graphs. They responded by ditching the graphs altogether and calling every last number unadjusted. This failed to satisfy him, so in the days afterwards he issued this unbelievable open letter.
Dear Jenny,
COVID-19 vaccine surveillance statistics
Thank you for the constructive meeting on Thursday October 28th to discuss the UK Health Security Agency’s (UKHSA) COVID-19 vaccine surveillance statistics. We focused on the risk that the data presented on rates of positive cases for those who are vaccinated and those who are unvaccinated have the potential to mislead – and indeed we noted that these data have been used to argue that vaccines are ineffective.
We welcome the changes you have made to the Week 43 surveillance report, published on October 28th. It is also very good that you are working closely with my team and with the relevant teams in the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The U.K. has backed itself into publishing some less-than-useful numbers. Now the office responsible for this publishing will have to work closely with a gaggle of political commissars, responsible for cleansing official discourse of anything that might be “used to argue that vaccines are ineffective”.
Because he appears to be a genuinely stupid man, Humpherson spells this point out explicitly:
It remains the case that the surveillance report includes rates per 100,000 which can be used to argue that vaccines are not effective. I know that this is not the intention of the surveillance report, but the potential for misuse remains. In publishing these data, you need to address more comprehensively the risk that it misleads people into thinking that it says something about vaccine effectiveness.
Emphasis mine. The next time somebody tells you that UKHSA reports show substantial protection against severe outcomes, draw their attention to Ed Humpherson’s letter. He thinks these numbers don’t tell you anything about anything. This is the first step towards not publishing them at all.
This is not just about the choice of denominator. It is about recognising that the comparison of case rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated groups is comparing datasets with known differences – including, potentially, the greater propensity of people who are vaccinated to come forward for tests. So the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon, not just a feature of how well vaccines work. I do not think your surveillance report goes far enough in explaining this crucial point.
Emphasis mine again. Humpherson has no idea what behavioural factors might be at issue. He is just throwing random ideas at the wall here. And notice how he slithers from what is “potentially” true to totally unqualified and unsupported assertions about is true (“the data reflect a behavioural phenomenon”). Maybe the higher unvaccinated death rates also “reflect a behavioural phenomenon“ and are “not just a feature of how well vaccines work”. As long as we are allowed to speculate baselessly, let’s do it in both directions.
He goes on to voice the old and tired complaint about the NIMS data. He wants UKHSA to use ONS population estimates instead. While the former might well understate the case rate among the unvaccinated, the latter is sure to overstate it, but Humpherson doesn’t care.
One possibility would be to only publish rates in the vaccinated population, which are known accurately, but I recognise your concern that you are already publishing rates for both groups.
Confirmation yet again of the obvious: They are only publishing these numbers because they locked themselves into doing so early on, when they looked good.
The alternative would be to use the ONS population estimates, which are used in the main coronavirus dashboard but which may be flawed for some age groups, as you have pointed out. … In the meantime, you should consider setting out these uncertainties more clearly, including by publishing the rates per 100,000 using both denominators, and making clear in the table, perhaps through formatting, that the column showing case rates in unvaccinated people is of particular concern.
That column is of particular concern because Humpherson doesn’t like the numbers in that column. He doesn’t care about the other columns because those numbers are neutral or pleasing to him.
And he closes with this:
I recognise that you want to maintain transparency and consistency, but these qualities should not be at the expense of informing the public appropriately.
Remember, always, that all Corona statistics are propaganda.
The UKHSA have issued a separate set of disclaimers on their website. Every line is fairly hilarious. And the Office of Statistical Regulation provides their own wall of text, where they show that if you understate the unvaccinated population with ONS numbers, indeed you can get the unvaccinated case rate to go up. Humpherson and his crack team of statistics regulators just love the ONS numbers, but UKHSA don’t like them so much. This is because UKHSA actually have to compile minimally plausible tables and for this they are unworkable. From p.15 of the Week 44 report:
When using ONS, vaccine coverage exceeds 100% of the population in some age groups, which would in turn lead to a negative denominator when calculating the size of the unvaccinated population.
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There are so many great writers on substack now like this one. Along with DS and a number of other independent sources, it gives me some hope that journalism is alive and well. To everyone taking the time to think, write and publish their work on CV19 etc –
A VERY BIG THANK YOU.
The best “journalism” often comes from people who are not full-time journalists. These researchers and correspondents then publish their articles wherever they can still be published (usually smaller, little-known sites that do not reach a mainstream audience). Sites like The Daily Skeptic are important because they then re-publish this “contrarian” reporting and allow it to reach a much larger audience. So, yes, kudos to these independent-thinking correspondents and to entrepreneurs who created sites like this that allow this reporting to reach a larger audience. None of us should be naive. Sites such as this must be on the target-list of Big Brother. Big Brother is afraid of the truth and doesn’t play fair when it comes to the truth “getting out.”
journalists are usually thick
interested 3rd parties that dabble in journalism will often be of a far higher quality
I don’t think they’re thick, it’s just that most of them have to sing to the tune of their publishers if they want to earn a living. The whole system has to change.
The Editors and “owners” have to carry the can for the “narrative” they print
A journalist might be wary of calling somebody stupid, sure enough a howler is only two paragraphs down the page.
Be careful what you say here.
Lies, damned lies and Gubbmint statistics
People (and reporters) also trust all the government statistics and pronouncements on economic data. For example, data on inflation and unemployment. This data is believed to be infallible. However, these numbers are also bogus or certainly dubious. Definitions that determine how inflation or unemployment are to be calculated have been changed to project the rosiest picture (a picture that does not match reality). That is, it is not just COVID data that is questionable or is being manipulated, it’s probably every piece of data the government compiles and releases to the public.
inflation data has been nonsense for years. it measures the value of money by looking at the cost of a basket of goods – a cost which has been driven down by offshoring production to cheap slave states. thus underestimating inflation.
The cost of the basket has been driven down by gradually excluding more and more of the actual/unmassaged costs of living. The “basket” has become steadily less and less representative of the real expenses of real people.
Research the gradual substitution of the RPI for the CPI , originally because of the “difficulty” in catering for representative housing costs ….sheer unadulterated bollox; there any many indices for price inflation and it cannot have escaped attention that the CPI has lagged the RPI by circa 2% points since it was foisted on the UK by the
TreasuryONS. The use of the CPI – when was the last time the weasel phrase “The Government’s preferred measure” was trotted out – is as massive a scandal as SARS COV2. Carney & Co have deliberately not raised interest rates when the BoE was mandated to keep inflation to below 2% or explain why to HMG in a formal letter. His market sensititive comments about the possibility/probability of having to think about the prospect of considering the likelihood of perhaps raising interest were straight from Sir Humphrey’s mouth. The deprivation of interest on the capital deposits of savers has yet to be calculated as far as I know, as well as the financially beneficial effect to borrowers paying significantly less interest by the same token. Carney & Co’s lack of action shifted billions from private individuals who saved to private/corporate borrowers whose leveraged assets grew whilst the real value of private individuals’ capital diminished by the inflation Carney & Co did not tackle.Independent BoE – my arse.
They hedonically adjust the basket so as to lower the volume of things as they go up in price (as price is a signal to purchase less) and raise the volume of things falling, the effect of this is to massage the inflation figure much lower.
They do not seem to carry forward any previous basket for a few months so as to verify it’s tracking similarly.
If you look at Ricardo’s law of rent it says ultimately inflation is going to be represented in land affordability and the ratio of wages to land costs has never been lower (the bricks and mortar parts has fallen too)
Well, this is all certainly waking us up to this fact…
Basically, data (facts) that might challenge the vaccine narrative are to be censored or controlled or de-emphasized. The same is true with journalism. Any story that might be interpreted as discouraging people to get vaccinated cannot and should not be published. Just about 100 percent of reporters in the corporate press intuitively understand this unspoken decree: We cannot publish stories that question or challenge the COVID or vaccine narrative. In this way, the “narrative” is controlled. And when the narrative is controlled, there is no basis to challenge the narrative. Terrible or unnecessary or dangerous policies are not questioned. When the “gatekeepers of the news” are co-opted and share the same agenda as governments and the Powers that Be, the narratives and policies that control the world are protected.
…narratives and policies that control the world are protected
you might be right there BRjnr, this above article shows a tussle in uk gov data. I noticed a few weeks ago when commenting briefly on the health/vax/hospital status of Belgium, that it was hard for me to find their ‘interesting’ stats.I searched Sciensano.be (Belgian institute for health) who publish previously minutely detailed Covid statistics. A few weeks ago, after publishing the proportion of vaccinated against unvax in the BE ICU & hospitals, where it was approaching 64% vaccinated vs 36% unvaccinated as an increasing trend, This data is now coincidentally missing!
you can (still) check the report from mid-October
https://covid-19.sciensano.be/sites/default/files/Covid19/COVID-19_Hospital_epidemiology_Part_1.pdf but the ratio vax/unvax isn’t apparently reported since then. Must be an oversight?
A couple of really good recent podcasts from Epoch times in case anyone’s not seen them
Great listening whilst fence painting!
To be fair to them, the figures in their raw state do not take into account the percentage of clinically vulnerable in either group (or at least they aren’t given).
To be truly comparable, they would either need the same percentages of that category in both (unlikely) or use some statistical sleight of hand to mimic it.
It is more likely to show – especially in the younger age groups who are by deifnition less clinically vulnearble – that those who aren’t jabbed probably already caught COVID because they are less risk-averse when going about their daily lives, recovered and thus now have a better level of immunity/resistance to COVID (and the more severe forms of the illness – likely getting the equivalent of a cold if reinfected) and which lasts far longer than the experiemental jabs.
I also suspect that the nuvaxxed are also less likely to get tested/report symptoms if they aren’t serious, becaause, well, they aren’t serious. I suspect that the pandemic has produced a lot of hypochondriacs who flinch at the first sign of a sniffle or cough, noting that that attitude (and stress more generally) actually can make you more susceptible to illness and recover slower.
Also, many unvaxxed people – like me, for instance – have personally taken positive steps to improve their health by eating better and exercising more over the last 18 months or so, which also helps. Many of the jabbed, I’ve observed, have gone back to their old familiar patterns of lazing around at home and junk food, thinking the vaccines have ‘saved them’.
These are pretty well the same conclusions that the wife and I (50s, 60s, not-jabbed, believe we had it XMas 2019, ie., early on) have come to.
We have upped our intake of things like Vitamin D; we have avoided track and trace and tests (to avoid getting sucked into the system). Equally we have seen the “I’m jabbed so that’s OK” syndrome.
Hmm, makes one think a bit: maybe there is some method in all this madness. Just maybe, this is all a deliberate culling of the thick and unthinking – something the human race is clearly in need of!
50% of Brits are below average intelligence.
Love it.
Some years ago – I think a headline in the Daily E*****s, without irony, ” 50% of pupils less than average ability in maths”.
The real problem is a) what the average is dropping to (apparently schoolkids IQs have dropped quite a bit ove the past 18 months due to distance learning or none at all) and b) the uncritical/woke normies who’ve been indocrinated by The hard Left who just believe everything someone in authority tells them.
Notice how the VAST majority of scientific discoveries over the centuries were made by people who railed against the accepted narrartive.
Now they just get cancelled and silenced by the media rather than burnt at the stake, tortured or imprisioned for life. Just the tools of censorship change, only this time those in charge also control the medium (money and the internet), which is a VERY dangerous presidence.
IQ isn’t determined by education.
The fact that practice can improve, for example, a MENSA score illustrates that at least in that organisation, the measure of IQ isn’t particularly accurate.
The point was that they were comparing like-with-like scores, meaning that kids were often not doing anything useful – especially learning – when self-isolating at home, and thus not doing so well when tested later.
I admit that IQ tests are not anywhere near as useful as they say they are – I never did that well on the ‘Richmond’ tests when at Primary school because my short-term memory was and still is poor, but I still had (and have) a decent amount of inate intelligence and became an engineer with a degree.
For me, I often come to a better solution to a problem, just less quickly than others. I also never liked the way I was taught at school, mainly because it relied heavily on taking in a lot of information quickly as well as writing it down at the same time, meaning I didn’t take a lot in because my memory was still processing it and was often bored by the dry information.
I was much better when given a book to read and shown practical and interesting applications in the real world of the knowledge. Probably why I ended up doing engineering at university and as a career.
you’re not wrong there. A friend on mine got tested last week because he had the sniffles after doing some exercise, something that’s pretty normal in cold weather.
A friend of mine caught covid early doors. Her husband and two grown daughters were isolated in their house with her, and nursed her back to health over a couple of weeks with no ill effects.
When the jabs were announced they were all first in the queue to get them.
I feel saying anything further might be considered cruel.
If you wave your hands like that really hard, you’ll blow all the coofs away from you. Perfect safety.
“I also suspect that the unvaxxed are also less likely to get tested/report symptoms if they aren’t serious, becaause, well, they aren’t serious. “
Certainly true in my case. I had the coof at Easter and while I did do a test (Mrs Dent *made me*) I did not report the positive result as my policy is to not engage with The Regime at all.
My (OAP) dad recently had what looked like a stinking cold – he is vaxxed, but didn’t want to get a COVID test, possibly because he either genuinely didn’t think it was the coof, or perhaps because I caught ‘it’ whilst visiting (my symptoms started a couple of days later), but mine went away after a few days.
We could’ve had the coof, just a mild version, but he wasn’t pleased that I said ‘No’ to this vaccine (not tested sufficiently over a long enough period for my liking) and didn’t want me to think I could shake it off like an ordinary-ish cold without a jab to help.
We’ll never know now.
As a thoughtful suggestion: why don’t the UKHSA have a word with some climate ‘scientists’? I think you would find that these experts could give some very helpful pointers to adjustment of unsatisfactory data!
“Discard all ‘outliers’ that don’t confirm the settled, lucrative science.”
Settled like the snow we predicted would be a thing of the past.
It is not the questioning of data that is the issue. Any competent statistician knows that almost any data set has its potential pitfalls.
What is the issue is the wholly biased examination of such flaws – so solid criticisms that undermine the official narrative are waved aside, whilst an extraordinary effort is spent in trying to justify it by claiming black is white.
In fairness to Humpybum, he’s probably correct that there are fundamental flaws within the data, and he’s absolutely correct that the behaviour of the vaxxed vs unvaxxed is different. I’d never dream of buying into any of this sh*t by reporting myself as a ‘case’, nor would I get tested in the first place.
So I can understand why there is a base for dispute on this data being used for actual comparing between the two camps.
However, when has that ever stopped them using similarly flawed data to push whatever narrative they want?
For example, the ‘cases’ figure is absolute rubbish and everyone knows it. It’s not based on test results (again, utterly rubbish) nor is it based on clinical observation. Dennis and Barbara from next door could have a heavy night of cider indulgence, then report a headache to 111 and get put in the case figures.
But this same, fundamentally flawed case count gets used to make decisions, often completely without question. So Humpybum can go sit in a bin if he doesn’t think this data will get used to fight against his tyranny.
What a farce! It all represents another example of the three “Cs” in action – in this case cock-up, conspiracy and corruption.
It would be easy to resolve this problem — just provide us with more data.
Clearly all this information would be informative as to the actual situation with covid and it would mean that we’d not struggle to make sense of the morsels of data that are accidentally thrown out.
Oh? Don’t want to actually give us data on how this disease is progressing and the impact of the vaccines? Then don’t blame us for making inferences with what we’re given.
or they could just do their bloody jobs so we don’t have to
The jobs we pay them to do
I’ve not seen much evidence that the government, or anyone else involved in this – “journalists”, “health”, “medical” and “scientific” communities – have any interest in finding out what is really happening. They cherry pick data to support their narrative.
“They cherry pick data to support their narrative.”
ie it has become political (if it ever wasn’t)
It may well always have been political for some of the actors in this. Possibly for others it became political soon after, once they realised the potential of covid to further their interests.
Clare Craig makes the following valid comment
https://twitter.com/ClareCraigPath/status/1457966571071094784
However, we look at it, it’s clear effectiveness against infection is pretty low.
makes you wonder about their claims of preventing hospital or death. they’ve lied about everything else
Early on in the vaccination campaign they chose to not vaccinate the most ill in each age cohort, because those individuals were considered to have a higher risk of death from vaccine related side effects and would be less likely to see a benefit from vaccination.
The effect of this is very visible in the deaths by vaccination status data released for the UK about a week ago.
By not vaccinating those closest to death they increased the average mortality rate of the unvaccinated group by a measurable amount, and the impact has been seen in all studies that have estimated the effectiveness of the vaccines and reducing hospitalisations/deaths.
I also assumed there would be some effect of very ill people or those unable to give consent not being vaccinated that would skew the figures
another ‘behavioural effect’ that makes all the data unreliable
in addition, unvacced groups tend towards poorer areas significantly. they tend to die of everything more and live 20 years less on average. another behavioral effect
I also see they have suddenly updated all their ‘confidence’ on vaccine efficacy in 1 week
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1031157/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-44.pdf
page 9
compared to the week before
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1029606/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-43.pdf
based on zero new evidence I expect – just after being bullied by the ONS
Yes, I noticed that too. Gone from ‘Low confidence’ to ‘high confidence’ in 7 days!
Here’s a chart I posted some days ago where I mentioned that this would create apparent efficacy of the vaccines where none existed
As you can see following the start of vaccinations in the 60-69 age group, covid labelled deaths in the unvaccinated go down but non-covid deaths in the unvaccinated go up for precisely the reason you say. The healthy get vaccinated leaving these most ill individuals to form a larger and larger proportion of the unvaccinated cohort.
The reason the covid deaths while going down in the unvaccinated, go down slightly less quickly in the unvaccinated than the vaccinated is not because of vaccine efficacy, it is because some of these unvaccinated people are most ill (the non-covid going up tells you that) but a proportion of them get their deaths labelled as covid.
It’s a huge effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvM5meOXk9o
Those claims are ALSO false according to Doshi.
Part of the problem is that they use a Test-Negative Case-Control methodology to calculate effectiveness — this is a great method to use when it works, but when it doesn’t it tends to give an overestimate of effectiveness.
All of these TNCC based estimates should be checked to see if there was any increased tendency in the vaccinated population to suffer from non-covid upper respiratory tract infections. This check should be done before TNCC is used, but it seems to be missing in every analysis I’ve seen.
I’d note that the Qatar paper on vaccine effectiveness includes both TNCC and multivariate analysis estimates (the other way to calculate this) — they give very different results, with multivariate showing significantly negative vaccine effectiveness. I’d say that this is a important indication that something is going wrong with the TNCC analysis and that an update is required urgently.
do you have a link to Qatar paper?
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.25.21262584v1.full.pdf
The authors don’t report a vaccine effectiveness below zero, i.e. negatives are reported as zero. However, the data enables one to calculate that actual figures. They hit -16% effectiveness after a few months.
Why is negative effectiveness i.e. immune harm reported as zero instead of the correct figure?
You’d have to ask the authors, but it is just a convention that they chose. If something gives you a disbenefit then it gives you ‘no benefit’, which they have chosen to report as zero rather than quantifying it as a disbenefit.
I have included below my annotated version of their graph showing the actual negative figures derived from their data (rather than having all negatives reported as zero.
The vaccine effectiveness wanes after only a month from second dose and then tanks spectacularly, not declining asymptotically to zero but going deeply negative.
Other studies show the same (e.g. large Swedish trial), which is certainly suggestive of why the rates of positive ‘cases’ in all adult age groups exceed the unvaccinated once a few months have elapsed from second dose.
Of course, this means that requiring care workers and NHS staff to be vaccinated is counterproductive because it will likely increase transmission. We are truly now in a pandemic of the vaccinated.
i never really believe officials or their stats anyway
after the head of the NHS making that lie up about 14x more people in hospital now than this time last year – and no apology, I just assume anything said is the opposite of the truth
the horror!
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=ltla&areaName=Aylesbury%20Vale
It’s almost as if vaccinologist Geert Vanden Bossche (ex GAVI and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) was right when he was so terrified months ago about mass jabbing in a pandemic. He was so concerned that he sent a short video to his buddies at the WHO but he was duly ignored. Now we are seeing immune escape, the jabbed are literally walking talking creators of new variants and shedders and spreaders of that not so lovely Spike protein! I caught covid from a double jabbed guy end of September and for me is was far less impactful than the flu I had as a child.NHS staff must all have the jab unless not face to face or have a medical exemption which you just know will be nigh impossible to get….all over a virus with a survival rate of 99.97%, average age of those dying from it is over 80 and they have at least 2 comorbidities….. it’s like living in an end of days movie isn’t it…..
“I caught covid from a double jabbed guy end of September”
How do you know it was ‘Covid’? When the PCR and LFT tests are not fit for purpose…
Every time someone says “I had Covid” they are extending this farce.
This is not new, only more serious. Please note my letter in BMJ on-line from December 2018 over the ONS hyping flu mortality by times 150 in order to get people to have the vaccines
https://www.bmj.com/content/361/bmj.k2795/rr-6
Government exaggerates flu mortality again: why cannot the public be trusted with the truth?I was perturbed and slighty astonished last week to see last winter’s excess mortality being largely attributed to the bad flu season, though it is well-established that this was not the case – the main culprit being on this occasion apparently the Office for National Statistics [ONS].
The BBC reported [1]:
“There were around 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2017-18 – the highest since the winter of 1975-76, figures from the Office for National Statistics show.
“The increase is thought to be down to the flu, the ineffectiveness of the flu vaccine in older people and spells of very cold weather last winter.”
The Daily Mail reported [2]:
“More than 50,000 excess deaths were recorded across England and Wales last winter, official figures show.
“Excess deaths refer to the amount of patients that died unexpectedly, calculated by comparing the mortality rate from winter months to the rest of the year.
“The shocking figures have been partially blamed on the deadly strains of flu that swept the nations over the colder months of December to March. ”
So the government are now apparent not only blaming fluctuations in winter mortality on flu but all excess winter mortality on flu, to the the tune of more than 50,000 deaths. The reality is that Public Health England had already published the flu mortality figures for the season in May [4]:
“Through the USISS mandatory scheme, a total of 3,454 ICU/HDU admissions of
confirmed influenza were reported across the UK from week 40 2017 to week 15 2018,
including 372 deaths, based on combined data from England, Scotland and Northern
Ireland. In England, the total number of influenza confirmed admissions to ICU/HDU
was 3,175 (rate of 0.22 per 100, 000 population) and 320 deaths during the same
period…
“The cumulative number of cases and deaths were higher compared to the 2016 to 2017
season (992 cases (rate of 0.06) and 112 deaths) and to the 2015 to 2016 season
(2,173 cases (rate of 0.14 per 100, 000) and 166 deaths) in England. This season
represents the highest number and rate observed since the beginning of the scheme
…”
On this basis, the number of deaths in England and Wales in an admittedly exceptionally bad year would have been only in the region of 335-340 deaths, and the ONS seem to have exaggerated the risk to the public by in the region of 150 times.
The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee have been complaining about low flu vaccine uptake again [5] but we do not even have any information about the vaccination status of the people who died. There are serious ethical issues both for medicine and government here which have yet to be addressed.
[1] ‘Excess winter deaths highest since 1970s, says ONS’ BBC Health 30 November 2018, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-46399090
[2] Vanessa Chalmers, ‘Winter death toll highest since 1975: Failure of flu jab to combat severe outbreak resulted in more than 50,000 extra people dying in England and Wales last year’, Daily Mail 30 November 2018,https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6446399/More-50-000-people-di…
[3] John Stone, ‘Discrepancies in published data’, BMJ 2010; 340 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c613 (Published 02 February 2010)
[4] ‘Surveillance of influenza and other respiratory viruses in the UK: Winter 2017 to 2018’ , Public Health England May 2018, p 21, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploa…
[5] Commons Select Committee: “Committee shocked by low uptake of flu vaccine”, https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-sel…
We call it COVID-1984 for a good reason.
MiniTruth adjust misspeak, case rates among goodthink proles down from 1% to only 2%.
The next time somebody tells you that UKHSA reports show substantial protection against severe outcomes, draw their attention to Ed Humpherson’s letter. He thinks these numbers don’t tell you anything about anything.
The vaccine surveillance reports include a section on vaccine effectiveness. It it just not the numbers that are being discussed. As Mary Ramsey says, these numbers are important to understand the implications of the pandemic to the NHS and to help understand where to prioritise vaccination delivery.
Humpherson has no idea what behavioural factors might be at issue.
Or possibly he doesn’t want to air his own hypotheses. In any case, just because he doesn’t know what the factors are, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
He wants UKHSA to use ONS population estimates instead.
No he doesn’t. He wants the UKHSA to publish rates based on both NIMS and ONS.
“In the meantime, you should consider setting out these uncertainties more clearly, including by publishing the rates per 100,000 using both denominators, ”
They are only publishing these numbers because they locked themselves into doing so early on, when they looked good.
Pure hypothesis and irrelevant. It doesn’t matter why they published them. What matters is what they tell us.
When using ONS, vaccine coverage exceeds 100% of the population in some age groups, which would in turn lead to a negative denominator when calculating the size of the unvaccinated population.
Just because the ONS figures understate the population it doesn’t mean the NIMS figures are right. The real lesson is we have only a hazy idea of the size of the unvaccinated population in the age groups where vaccination levels are high.
“Just because the ONS figures understate the population it doesn’t mean the NIMS figures are right.”
Correct. The NIMS figures could be underestimates.
“we have only a hazy idea of the size of the unvaccinated population in the age groups where vaccination levels are high.”
How can it be claimed that “vaccination levels are high” if we have only a hazy idea of the size of the unjabbed population?
I trust the supermarkets to have a better idea of the population of the UK. They have no incentive to lie.
The NIMS figures could be underestimates.
Possibly – but the main potential for error is duplicate registration or registration of people who have died or left the country.
How can it be claimed that “vaccination levels are high” if we have only a hazy idea of the size of the unjabbed population?
Although the ONS and NIMS estimates are subject to error they are not vastly different. However, in age groups where vaccination is high the calculation of the unvaccinated population is sensitive to small changes in the population estimate.
I trust the supermarkets to have a better idea of the population of the UK. They have no incentive to lie.
Do they issue population estimates?
You’ve got to admire the sheer determination to keep trying to push the vaccines, when the narrative is threadbare & falling apart. That or gasp at just idiotic our politicians really are, calling them idiots is letting them off easy.
The problem with all this data diddling is that we tend to forget some of the basics – like the fact that SARS-CoV-2, in the first place, is no big deal or worthy of the expensive dog’s dinner that has been made of its supposed amelioration.
(Hark now at the cries of “But sooo many have sadleedide!”. – No they haven’t!)
There’s been a lot of discussion about the UKHSA and ONS proportions unvccinted and how they difer.
So I thought I’d produce a chart to compare the proportions in each vaccination status (unvaccinated, one dose, two doses) by age group comparing the UKHSA data from NIMS (I used the week 40 spreadsheet that goes up to week 39) and the ONS data. Note that the UKHSA data is based on the vaccination status during each previous week of the population in NIMS at week 39. That’s not perfect but it’s good enough for my purposes here.
Here it is. There’s a good match until you zoom in at the end on the unvaccinated when you see the issue. The zoomed in chart is in my reply.
And here’s the close up showing the unvaccinated proportion is significantly different in the 60+ age groups. There is no real difference in the 10-59 age group at least when considering the age group as a whole, but there may still be dsicrepancies within that wide age band.
So how do we know that the UKHSA figures are most accurate? There are 2 strong bits of solid evidence that suggest that UKHSA are correct.
Apologies I think the age 10-59 chart may be wrong.
I think this is the correct version.
It’s difficult to be certain this is correct as the data for the UKHSA line involves combining data across a range of ages and then adjusting around age 10 because UKHSA only has an under 12 category.
“greater propensity of people who are vaccinated to come forward for tests”
“When in doubt, let’s just call black white” seems like a very popular technique in politics nowadays.
No (mRNA/DNA) vaccines, no epidemicIndia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Indonesia collectively have 2 billion people… and essentially no access to advanced Covid vaccines.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/no-mrnadna-vaccines-no-epidemic?r=296gf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=
Germany also has a melt down.
There is still no government as the various parties are in consultation to form one.
However, that are all in agreement on one thing.
There is a need to make new regulations to cope with what they see as a looming health crisis.
What is the melt down? The fact this particular issues is due to contain a surge that has been fueled by Germany’s relatively(what the article says is) a low rate of vaccination.
The article goes on to say
70% full vaccinated so they do need to restrict life to the same level as last year. That should be the end of conversation. This suggests it it not.
https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-coronavirus-government-coalition-social-democrats-liberal-free-democrats-fourth-wave/
A warning to all of you in England. As you may know, in Scotland they have introduced vaccine passports for certain venues. As I predicted, now having been given this power, they are expanding their control and rule over us including hospitality venues and gyms. No evidence that gyms cause transmission but they don’t care. I suspect that they know may health conscious people use gyms who are therefore reluctant to take an experimental vaccination therefore we must be coerced even more. In England you must do all you can to resist these passports as they will claim its only few venues required and once in place will expand this as we are now seeing in Scotland.
They will also expand the number of jabs you have to have to keep the thing valid, pharma intends to have us like pin cushions.
If you assume that Boris is doing his best to deal with a deadly pandemic then almost eveything he has done makes no sense.
If you assume Boris is a corrupt scum bag that has agreed to sell out th epopulation of the UK to the interests of big pharma and their vaccines everything he has done makes sense.
While the MSM condemns the use of ivermectin, the most populated state in India just declared they are officially COVID free after promoting widespread use of the safe, proven medicine. In addition to this, Ivermectin attaches to covid spikes and prevents them from binding to ACE2. Get your Ivermectin today while you still can! https://ivmpharmacy.com
Humpherson starts off by saying, reasonably, that the vaccinated and unvaccinated are distinct populations differing from each other in multiple ways. Then follows a sheer guess at a possible difference which might distort the relationship between case rates and vaccination status, phrased as if it was definite fact.
As an exercise in statistics as propaganda, this tactic would be completely routine in an exchange consisting of a dissenting newspaper opinion piece and a rapid rebuttal from officialdom drafted to manufacture the impression that dissent had been refuted.
What makes it remarkable is that Harries, just as much as Humpherson, regards statistics as the servant of policy and graphs as a method of forming educated public opinion. If that is how you see the matter, Henderson’s job – regulating government misuse of statistics – amounts to identifying propaganda failures and demanding the manufacture of more effective propaganda, not manufacturing it himself. We all know that Harries and Humpherson are part of the blob. This episode reveals that there is an Inner Blob, and that Humpherson is part of it and Harries is not.
For me, there have been two very notable statistical “smoking guns” over the course of the pandemic i.e. official data which blows a hole in the govt approach and caused me to sit up and listen.
The first is the excel spreadsheet on the NHS ENgland covid website which breaks down deaths by age and underlying condition, updated weekly. Shows that hardly any covid deaths are healthy people aged under 60.
The second are the Vaccine Surveillance Reports which, however way you choose to skin it, blow a hole in vaccine effectiveness against infection. The government knows this, of course, hence the push for (presumably endless) boosters.
I have never been able to understand how a vaccine prevents infection with a respiratory virus. A vaccine provokes the body into mounting a systemic immune response so that if a virus does get in, it will generate a better immune response than in an unvaccinated person. In other words, the virus gets in but is too rapidly neutralised to do anything nasty. So rather than being surprised that the infection rate is higher in vaccinated people we should look for a simple explanation – like vaccinated folk have decided they are now safe, so have dropped their guard with precautions, while the unvaccinated are maintaining theirs. Or some other explanation. But if you think that a vaccine somehow bounces a virus out of your mouth or nose when you inhale, or sits on the mucosal lining waiting to strike you need to take a lesson in medicine!
What does appear to be unchallenged is that vaccination reduces the risk of developing severe illness, which is the main object of the exercise.
…like vaccinated folk have decided they are now safe, so have dropped their guard with precautions, while the unvaccinated are maintaining theirs. The complete opposite is true in my experience. It is the frightened vaccinated who are continuing to wear masks and social distance, whereas those who have refused the vaccine have generally ignored the restrictive measures throughout this whole sorry saga. I suspect the true explanation is that the unvaccinated have better immunity – acquired naturally after exposure to the Sars-Cov-2 virus. The evidence is overwhelming that natural immunity is better than vaccine-induced immunity – even John Campbell, a voice of the medical establishment, admits as much.
Agree. i met my cousin for lunch at a local garden centre yesterday. mainly elderly clientele but quite a number of younger ones. I would guess the vast majority were vaccinated and probably in the case of the elderly boosted as well. Yet probably 75% or more still wearing face masks.
I do think though that the unjabbed are less likely to bother with tests. I almost certainly wouldn’t if i thought i had covid, might do a LFT out of interest but not report the results and certaintly wouldn’t do a PCR. My sister who is jabbed and recently got covid did a PCR test and when i asked her why (she was being harassed by the track and trace mob) she said she just thought it was ‘the responsible thing’ to do. Which is an interesting insight into how people have been brainwashed into believing what is ‘right’ in the new ‘we are all in this together’ (ha-ha) world.
Irrespective of the data on efficacy or should I say lack of efficacy of these vaccines, the fact is that other very serious illnesses are rising in the vaccinated. Dr Ryan Cole in the US talks about how he and many colleagues are seeing 20x more cancers and that is just for starters. And no not due to lack of healthcare during lockdowns because the incidence is higest in the vaccinated. I know of several whose cancers have now returned- since being jabbed- and I do not believe it is a coincidence. Drs (again in the US) have shown that these vaccines detrimentally affect the immune system. They have shown the blood test results and videos of what they are finding. So I just cannot fathom why anyone in their right mind would take an injection that has a decent chance of increasing a liklihood of what is a serious chronic illness v what is in reality a very a mild respiratory type illness for well over 99% and is in fact both treatable and preventable if you take the right steps. And we are only at the start of all this and have seen nothing yet… There is no long term safety data, these vaccines are experimental and still in trial and you only have to do your due diligence regarding the true ingredients to see a shocking picture emerge.
This excellent piece demonstrates the nonsense of basic decisions on statistics when the susceptibility of any individual of contracting any infection and the subsequent morbidity is so polyfactorial that it is only prospective controlled studies are useful.This journal has maintained the necessary skepticism to permit rational thought. As Lord Moynihan once opined / / – ever individual is their own unique experiment,
Our leaders are devoid the intellectual scientific education to permit them to understand even the simple basis of the infective process,
Where are the publications on vaccine morbidity is the US VARS data and our card system wrong!
“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth.”
George Orwell
In response to James’ comment that natural infection produces better immunity than vaccination, that it generally agreed (I do). Our local experience is, however, that a recent spike was generated by an event attended by almost universally vaccinated people – in a closed room, maskless and singing. In the absence of a proper strategy for identifying people with SARS-CoV-2 and treating them when they progress to Covid-19 I would like to reduce that risk of progression. Vaccination does not eliminate the risk, but the figures for hospitalisation and deaths do suggest that it reduces it a lot. Good enough for me.
I understand that. But the problem is vaccine-induced immunity wanes very quickly. Do we really want to inject people with mRNA every 5 months? There is growing evidence that such a policy could adversely affect immunity and have other detrimental effects. It is not a risk I would want to take.
But the regime wants to do this to us.
Do they have the resources to administer, overall, five jabs every 12 months to 68 million people? 340 million jabs per year, give or take a few million.
This may be as many as the number of repeat prescriptions, and possibly more than doubles GPs’ workload
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/pressures-in-general-practice
Note: I have used the word ‘regime’. 10 Downing Street arguably isn’t a government. Democracies have governments. In the past places like Latin America, Asia and Africa had regimes.
Lord Sumption said that these laws are tyrannical and should not be obeyed. They are not the creation of a governmment.
Classic straw man. It is the overall (vaccinated plus unvaccinated) death rate that is important. Not the vaccinated vs unvaccinated infection rates. The vaccines are not sterilizing immunity vaccines and were designed to lower the impact of the disease. The death rate among the unvaccinated is much higher for the vulnerable population than among the vaccinated ( data online).
https://www.factcheck.org/2021/11/scicheck-why-its-easy-to-misinterpret-numbers-of-deaths-among-the-vaccinated/
“Consider the hypothetical world where absolutely everyone had received a less than perfect vaccine. Although the death rate would be low, everyone who died would have been fully vaccinated,…”
““As the number of people vaccinated in a population grows, we expect to see relatively more deaths in the vaccinated. This ‘base rate’ phenomenon can make it hard to interpret the data,” Natalie Dean, assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics & Bioinformatics at the Emory University Rollins School of Public Health, told us via email. “It doesn’t mean the vaccines aren’t working well against deaths (they are) but just that the vast majority of vulnerable adults in the UK have been vaccinated.”
How can the death rate among the unvaccinated be higher than among the vaccinated in the USA if the above is correct ?
Doesn’t the comment contradict itself ?
No. It depends on the vaccination rate.
“As the number of people vaccinated in a population grows, …..”
One blogger said …
and who looked at the real statistics?
Yes, there are a few more cases, but this blogger modestly missed the fact that there are ten times fewer hospitalized. And there are also ten times fewer deaths.
Why be surprised that the virus spreads through vaccinated people? it’s a virus. Vaccination helps to protect against it, and does not become an impenetrable dome.
Listen less to some bloggers who, for the sake of hype, are ready to tear their ass off in order to give a shit in your brain as much as possible. Check all the data yourself.