Mark Steyn has been one of the most consistently brave and brilliant political analysts of our generation. He has always firmly stood his ground, challenging the ‘official’ narrative on issues like climate change, illegal immigration and cultural Marxism, in the face of constant attacks from the establishment. He does it all with great wit and sarcasm.
Steyn was one of the only ‘mainstream’ media personalities to speak critically about the Covid vaccines and to interview the vaccine-injured and bereaved when he was a presenter on GB News in 2022. This clearly riled the establishment, who demanded that Ofcom, the British regulator of TV and radio, intervene. Hence, in December 2022, Ofcom ruled that two of Steyn’s programmes were in breach of Ofcom regulations.
One of the Ofcom rulings focused on a programme in which Steyn claimed that UKHSA (U.K. Health Security Agency) data showed triple-vaccinated people were at much greater risk of contracting, being hospitalised and dying from COVID-19 than unvaccinated people. Ofcom ruled that Steyn misled the public on these claims, stating:
Mark Steyn said in the programme that UKHSA data on those people that had, and those that had not, received a third COVID-19 vaccination dose could be compared because the two groups included approximately the same numbers of people. However, his interpretation that there was “only one conclusion” from this comparison – that the third vaccination caused increased levels of infection, hospitalisation and death – was misleading because it did not take account of key factors such as the significant differences in age or health of the people in these two groups. The programme also failed to reflect that the UKHSA reports made clear that the raw data should not be used to draw conclusions about vaccine efficacy, due to the biases inherent in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
The other ruling focused on a programme in which his guest Naomi Wolf made claims about vaccine adverse reactions. Ofcom ruled that these claims were inaccurate and that Steyn failed in his duty as the presenter to challenge Wolf on them.
Ofcom, who act as judge and jury, did not allow Steyn to provide any defence against the rulings, and so he decided to mount a judicial review against them in the High Court. The case was heard in the Royal Courts of Justice, London by Justice Farbey on June 11th, 2022. On July 30th, 2024, Justice Farbey ruled in favour of Ofcom. Her full judgement can be found here.
A couple of weeks before the case went to Court on June 11th, 2024, I was asked to provide a report about the statistical issues relating to the claims about the UKHSA data. My findings challenge Justice Farbey’s final decision about this, namely her conclusion:
Ofcom was not “obviously wrong” to insist that broadcasters avoid the risk that vaccinated individuals be caused alarm.
Hence, it is important now to bring the facts into the public domain that show that Ofcom was indeed “obviously wrong”. Sadly, it seems Justice Farbey did not have these full facts at her disposal.
In summary, my report (which includes relevant links to the data and evidence) found that:
- Ofcom’s ruling that “Mark misled the viewer” is based on the narrow examination of the available UKHSA data and only that to which Steyn specifically referred. Ofcom took no account of all relevant data available at that time, which categorically supports (and strengthens) the contention suggested by Steyn that the vaccinated were more likely to be hospitalised than the unvaccinated. Analysis of all the data shows Steyn’s assessment not just to be correct but to underestimate the negative hospital outcomes for the vaccinated categories when compared to the unvaccinated.
- Ironically, the only editorial criticism Ofcom could have validly made was that Steyn did not provide an analysis in support of his contention using all relevant data available – and that, if he failed in anything, it was to insufficiently alert the audience to the risks from booster vaccination. Not only were the boosters ineffective, but the Covid case rates in the ‘ever vaccinated’ were higher than those in the ‘never vaccinated’ in almost all age groups and at least three times higher in the boosted than the never vaccinated.
- With respect to Covid mortality data, Steyn’s comparison between the UKHSA boosted and unboosted vaccine categories was indeed oversimplified, but this was understandable given the obfuscated way in which the UKHSA presented the data. Even had he broken it down by age to avoid ‘age confounding’ (as the Ofcom counsel correctly claimed he should have done), it would not have changed the overall conclusion to be drawn from the data that, for a reason known only to Ofcom, they failed to consider.
- Missing from Ofcom’s analysis was anything about all-cause mortality (i.e., death from any cause) as opposed to just Covid mortality. Only by comparing the all-cause mortality rates of the vaccinated and unvaccinated can we get a true assessment of the efficacy of the vaccines. If the vaccines are saving more lives from Covid than they are causing from adverse reactions to the vaccines, then the all-cause mortality rate in the vaccinated would be lower than in the unvaccinated. Hence, all-cause mortality is the most important and objective statistic; it completely avoids the many concerns about what constitutes a ‘Covid death’. It turns out that, in most age groups, the all-cause mortality rate was higher in the boosted than the unboosted. And, once we take account of systemic biases in the data, all-cause mortality was higher in the ever vaccinated than the never vaccinated in every age group.
- Hence, once the systemic biases in the relevant UKHSA (and also the Office for National Statistics) datasets are accounted for, they show a consistent lack of efficacy for the vaccines. Ofcom, in its ruling against Steyn, has encouraged the suppression of this critical information while the public has continued to be offered booster vaccines, exposing them to risk and thereby subjecting them to harm.
- If Steyn missed addressing the effect of age confounding, Ofcom’s omission was much more serious and fundamental. It is guilty of using this narrow point to ‘disprove’ a thesis which in every other respect stands up. They are, in fact, guilty of the blowfish fallacy. This is the technique of laser-focusing on an inconsequential methodological aspect of scientific research, blowing it out of proportion to distract from the bigger picture. If you persuade people to focus hard enough on specific details, they can miss the gorilla walking through the room.
On its website Ofcom states:
OFCOM’s principal duty is: (i) to further the interests of citizens, and (ii) to further consumer interests in relevant markets, where appropriate by promoting competition.
Ofcom is supposed to be independent and dispassionate. It is neither their role to endorse Government policy nor to prevent criticism of it. In contrast to their ruling against Steyn, Ofcom did nothing about the multiple instances of ‘TV doctors’ making false claims about vaccine efficacy. For example, in one especially infamous programme segment screened on ITV, Dr. Sara Kayat claimed that the (subsequently withdrawn) AstraZeneca vaccine was “100% effective against hospitalisation and death”, with no interrogation from the presenters about risk, at great potential harm to the public. Ofcom did nothing despite hundreds of complaints to them about this segment.
Until he retired last year, Norman Fenton was Professor in Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London. Subscribe to his blog.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.