One of my recent posts on the Daily Sceptic was the subject of a ‘fact check‘ by Full Fact, which self-importantly describes itself as “the UK’s independent fact checking organisation” but is in fact funded by Google, Facebook and George Soros, among others, to help them suppress unapproved news and views. Even U.K. broadcasting regulator Ofcom has said it relies on the organisation to tell it what to censor regarding COVID-19, so unfortunately the dog has teeth and can’t just be ignored as one more absurd website with excessive faith in its own infallibility.
The post in question, from September 10th, simply reported on Public Health England’s latest Vaccine Surveillance report, which included infection rates by vaccination status for the previous month so allowed the calculation of an unadjusted estimate of vaccine effectiveness. Full Fact, however, took exception to the idea that vaccine effectiveness can be estimated in this way, because it wasn’t adjusted for confounders. Or used the wrong population data. Or because the article included the (entirely accurate) claim that the PHE report showed higher infection rates in the vaccinated in some age groups. Or because the heading didn’t include ‘caveats’. Or something. In any case, it was ‘incorrect’.
Here follows my correspondence with them, attempting to explain that the factual errors lay entirely in their ‘fact check’, not in my piece.
September 27th 2021
To: The Editor
Incorrect claim that report from Public Health England shows COVID-19 vaccines have “negative effectiveness” in the over-40s: Full Fact correction request
I’m writing to you from Full Fact, the U.K.’s independent fact checking organisation. I have seen an article you published on Friday September 24th so I know you are already aware of a fact check we published earlier last week, but I wanted to send an email to explain why we wrote that fact check.
The article you published on September 10th had the headline “Vaccines Have NEGATIVE Effectiveness in the Over-40s, as Low as MINUS 38%, Shows New PHE Report”
This headline falsely claims that a report from Public Health England (PHE) shows COVID-19 vaccines having “negative effectiveness” in the over-40s. It is not true that the PHE report shows this.
You note in your article that PHE says its data cannot be used on its own as a reliable measurement of vaccine effectiveness. However your headline makes a claim about vaccine effectiveness based on it.
As you will know we have published a fact check on these claims which is available on our website here:
“Vaccines do not raise your risk of catching Covid”
We are asking that you issue a correction on this article in line with the above. We would also ask that you bear this in mind when writing future articles about this data, including the one you published on Friday. We hope our fact check is helpful in this regard.
Please let me know if you’d like to discuss this further.
Many thanks,
Bethan Davies
Policy and Impact Manager
Full Fact
October 5th 2021
Good afternoon,
I just wanted to follow up on an email I sent last week about a fact check we have written on an article you published on 24th September. I will be updating this fact check on our website this week with details of what action we have taken so I wanted to check in with you before I do this. If you are planning to amend this article I’d be very grateful if you could let me know.
Many thanks,
Bethan
October 5th 2021
Dear Bethan
Thank you for your email.
Apologies – I appear to have missed your first email.
As you are aware, I have written in response to your piece ‘fact-checking’ my article of September 10th (here and now also here).
Your piece wrongly implies that people had been confused by PHE’s report as it “seemed to show for the month in question (August 9th to September 5th) that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s were more likely to test positive for Covid if they had been vaccinated than if they hadn’t”. However, the report doesn’t “seem” to show that, it plainly does show that. Can you explain why your piece attempts to cast doubt on this correct understanding of the data in PHE’s report, and thus misinform the public about the infection risk among vaccinated and unvaccinated people during that month? Will you be amending your piece to ensure it does not confuse or mislead in this way and makes clear that in fact the PHE report does show that vaccinated people in those age groups were more likely to test positive for Covid during that period?
Your piece’s discussion about population estimates is interesting but I hope you will agree that people are entitled to present data and make calculations based on the population data PHE presents in its reports?
You say in your email: “PHE says its data cannot be used on its own as a reliable measurement of vaccine effectiveness.” Those are your words, not theirs. They say: “The vaccination status of cases, inpatients and deaths is not the most appropriate method to assess vaccine effectiveness…” (emphasis added).
However, regardless of what PHE say is the “most appropriate method”, the fact is that vaccine effectiveness is defined as the reduced risk of infection in the vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated (see here). I am clear in the piece that the VE figures given are unadjusted (though they are controlled for age). I explain the limitations of the estimates and address the reason PHE gives for the sample being biased. This is a perfectly valid approach to presenting an estimate of vaccine effectiveness, provided the limitations are clear. It also needs to be kept in mind that studies which do attempt to adjust for various confounders can come with significant problems of their own (see e.g. this and this).
A study in the Lancet published yesterday confirms that vaccine effectiveness has been declining fast against Delta and over time – and that study used data only up to the start of August. This indicates that the VE figures you quote in your ‘fact check’ to counter mine are out of date. The point of estimating unadjusted VE from real-world data is to try to keep up with how vaccines are faring now, not six months ago. We are not trying to denigrate vaccines – that’s why we are sure to make clear their continued effectiveness against serious illness and death. We are only interested in reporting up-to-date factual information about them.
My question for you is why you appear to be attempting to cover over the fact that infection rates in the vaccinated are very high – on PHE data, higher than in the unvaccinated, with the gap increasing week-on-week? Would fact-checking energies not be better spent on those who continue to claim that the vaccines are highly effective against infection, a claim which looks less and less accurate with each passing week?
I would be grateful for confirmation that you have amended your piece to ensure it does not mislead about current infection rates in vaccinated people (according to PHE data) and about the latest vaccine effectiveness estimates.
Kind regards
Will
Will Jones
Associate Editor – Daily Sceptic
October 7th 2021
Dear Will,
Thank you for your response to my email.
We disagree with your point that we have misunderstood the PHE report.
We acknowledge in our fact check that your article mentions PHE’s caveats, but our fact check and the email we sent you initially are related to your headline, which has no caveats in it.
We are happy with information we included on vaccine effectiveness and we have made it clear to readers where this came from.
We very much appreciate you setting out your position. In conclusion however, after consideration, we will not be amending our fact check.
Kind regards,
Bethan
October 7th 2021
Dear Bethan
Thank you for your reply.
You say your ‘fact check’ is related to our headline. Please can you spell out more precisely for me what you object to in the headline? Is it because it doesn’t include the word ‘unadjusted’ before ‘vaccine effectiveness’? Or is it something else? Unadjusted vaccine effectiveness is still a form of vaccine effectiveness so the headline is not inaccurate on that point (and the caveats are explained in the piece). Part of the problem is that you seem to regard vaccine effectiveness as something which can only be calculated in a formal study, rather than a quantity representing the reduced proportion of infections in a vaccinated group versus an unvaccinated group which may be calculated on any such data set (with limitations acknowledged). It is therefore not ‘incorrect’, as you claim, for me to calculate vaccine effectiveness from population data and report on it.
I appreciate that you are happy with the information you have included on vaccine effectiveness. However, the important point is it is not valid to claim that an article using more up-to-date data on real-world infection rates among vaccinated and unvaccinated groups is ‘incorrect’ by citing out-of-date estimates from studies using data from earlier periods, even if they come from government sources. You can point out that the new estimates disagree with the old estimates, but that doesn’t invalidate the new estimates or make them ‘incorrect’. What you are doing amounts to attempted censorship of reporting on emerging data, rather than ‘fact-checking’.
You say you disagree that you have misunderstood the PHE report. But you clearly imply that the PHE report does not show infection rates higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. To quote:
This data had already caused widespread confusion, because it seemed to show for the month in question (August 9th to September 5th) that people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s were more likely to test positive for Covid if they had been vaccinated than if they hadn’t. In particular, a chart displaying the data seemed to give this impression.
This is a patently misleading section as you completely fail to acknowledge that the report plainly does show infection rates higher in the vaccinated in these age groups and instead attempt to make it sound like it does not and that this was a matter of ‘confusion’ on the part of others. The PHE report even explicitly states: “In individuals aged 40 to 79, the rate of a positive COVID-19 test is higher in vaccinated individuals compared to unvaccinated.”
I urge you again, as a matter of professional integrity and for the sake of the credibility of your site, to amend the ‘fact check’ so that it is not misleading in this way and makes clear that the PHE report is correctly understood as showing infection rates higher in the vaccinated in these age groups during this time period.
Kind regards
Will
Will Jones
Associate Editor – Daily Sceptic
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Still banging on about lockdowns ( yawn ), so I’ll keep on mentioning ‘Sweden’ ( yawn ), who called it from the start and basically debunk all and any cobblers that LDs did diddly squat.
But what I would like to share is this paper, because I don’t know if it got any coverage on here in August. I don’t get bogged down in the whole minutia of viruses and their evolution, because I don’t profess to understand much of it. However, is it beyond the realms of possibility that all of the scariants ( including subscariants ) have and are being deliberately released from GoF labs, as opposed to naturally evolving like others not borne from a lab? It would certainly explain how they’re all so confident we’re going to be hit with scamdemic after scamdemic and we’re to just accept and get used to this as the new normal.
”As a result, we concluded that the formations of a part of Omicron isolates BA.1, BA.1.1, and BA.2 were not the products of genome evolution as is commonly observed in nature, such as the accumulation of mutations and homologous recombinations. Furthermore, the study of 35 recombinant isolates of Omicron variants BA.1 and BA.2, confirmed that Omicron variants were already present in 2020. The analysis we have shown here is that the Omicron variants are formed by an entirely new mechanism that cannot be explained by previous biology, and knowing the way how the SARS-CoV-2 variants were formed prompts a reconsideration of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.”
https://zenodo.org/record/8216373
I’ve thought that for ages, that they are man made, off the shelf formulations, released at convenient intervals. it’s just a money making machine for big pharma. I have also noticed that ANY cold like bug going around is now automatically labelled covid by the ‘permanently scared’ (and spoken about in hushed voices!). No one just gets a cold anymore, seemingly.
Yes you’re absolutely right. People, such as Igor Chudov, have been talking about Omicron being lab-made since 2021, but I think we’re on Omicron Episode 22 now, with multiple sequels and spin-offs ( I don’t keep up with all of these new daft names and letters they’re giving to a damn lurgy virus. It’s farcical. ). I’ve never understood how a lab-made virus is expected to evolve ‘naturally’, like the hundreds of other viruses we’ve managed to coexist with for aeons and never became extinct as a species as a result. Natural immunity, eh? What a ‘conspiracy theory’! So whenever they bring another one out I’m now just assuming it’s been deliberately released from multiple labs around the world.
My worry is that as long as there’s these stupid, fraudulent tests in existence ( as well as masks. When were masks ever sold widely to the public in all shops? ), and the predictable fear porn that gears up every year in the MSM, the paranoid, hypochondriacs of the world will buy into it and keep the whole narrative going. How can it ever end as long as these things are in place?
I’ve always thought Omicron was released to cover up how shit the jabs are. So they could turn around and say ‘Ooh look at our miracle cure’. Del called it at the time and lab release variants were covered on the Highwire last week.
Sounds crazy, but worth exploring given the depth and breadth of experience that can be accessed here.
Who is releasing them? When, where and how? Who, with what skills and agency, would need to be involved?
Are governments and security agencies complicit?
Or would it be a unilateral operation by big pharma to develop a subscription model for income. After all, no-one buys cough medicine for a couple of quid more than once a year, and you don’t even do that if it doesn’t do any good. But INJECTIONS, ooh, for many it’s like a ritual, go to the witchdoctor in his ceremonial white coat, pass the gatekeepers at reception etc etc, it’s like someone cares about you and you are important.
If UKHSA thinks NPI’s aren’t the solution, be concerned they push pharma options as the only solution.
The problem is UKHSA are still saying lockdown and other NPIs and big pharma vaccines are the solutions but that they need to invent more evidence to support them.
Cost/benefit analysis of proposed measures is an integral part of the precautionary principle used to justify lockdowns in the first place.
If the HSA was at all competent, a cost/benefit analysis would be front and centre of this report.
If the MHRA was at all competent, it would look into why it is not……
If the permanent secretary at the department of health was at all competent, he would ask that question of the MHRA………
If the health minister was at all competent, he would ask that question of his permanent secretary………
If the house of commons was at all competent…….
If the speaker…..
All complicit, so they will not……..
Any cost calculation has to involve a notional price on liberty and normal life, which will immediately outweigh any possible benefits in all but the most extreme cases. There’s no need to quantify secondary costs, IMO. But this is now an extremist position, rather than what it used to be which was orthodoxy, part of the social contract – people “get” colds and people mix and those colds “spread”, there’s nothing we can do about it and nothing we want to do about it, move on, accept life’s ups and downs. This is where I think we have suffered a huge defeat in that NPIs and “pandemic planning” have been normalised, and this is why I think we should be wary of arguing about whether lockdowns “work” or not.
It may be that we will have to wait for an entire new generation of non complicit functionaries and politicians to come through before history can be set straight, but it must be set straight.
Fortunately ‘revisionism’ is always attractive to the ambitious…..and historians….
For the benefit of anyone new: I don’t care whether lockdowns and other “covid” restrictions “work” (whatever that could possibly mean) or not. All they can possibly do is delay the inevitable (if there’s some new “virus”, everyone will be exposed, many time). They are simply wrong, and the price is too high – depriving people of normal life and liberty for even a day can only be justified in the most extreme of circumstances, not for a mild respiratory condition of the type we’ve lived with since forever.
Precisely. All this for a common cold coronavirus whose treatment: alleviate the symptoms and let the immune system do the rest, was set out by David Tyrrell of the Common Cold Unit over thirty years ago…….
Exactly and the only ‘expert’ they needed on SAGE was a bookie to analyse the risk and cost of keeping people locked up for a virus that 98% survive!
To my mind, the possibility that lockdowns work at the time but only delay the inevitable is actually part of them not working. So they might “work” for the people who shut themselves away at home for the duration, but those people get it anyway when (if) they re-emerge, so it therefore hasn’t worked, at least not in the way we were promised (the curve would be magically flattened within the space of 3 weeks and then somehow stay magically flattened when we all came back out to play). So even though they “work”, they don’t actually work, and they cause immense damage into the bargain.
The only possible justification would be perhaps for 3 weeks or so to ready the systems and bump up hospital capacity etc, exactly as we were promised (actually bump it up I mean, not build performative, enormous and ruinously expensive new warehouses that could never be staffed), but it was obvious even from before we actually locked down that once we did, we would be stuck in it for months/years because every time it was released or they even thought about releasing it, cases would be too high or might get too high at some point in the future. “We can’t throw away all our hard work” etc etc.
Yes indeed the very concept of them “working” is largely nonsense. The other plausible reasoning would be to limit “cases” until a “vaccine” was ready. I suppose you could justify such a policy if the disease were serious enough and there was a realistic possibility of developing an effective vaccine that didn’t do more harm than good – but if you had such a severe disease then you wouldn’t need ads on the telly to tell people to stay away from one another.
But how long do you give it before you admit that a vaccine isn’t going to happen? Do you stay in lockdown for 6 months, a year, 5 years? When do you give up? Unfortunately, since they did come up with something they called a vaccine for covid, next time this will probably be wheeled out as justification to lock down again because we got a vaccine last time.
Exactly- the only likely outcome is that something is rushed out disregarding established protocols, in desperation.
And that’s the unrealistically charitable view where tptb have good intentions.
However, we must not lose sight of WHY the ridiculous NPI’s were imposed.
Indeed – difficult to argue that those imposing them actually believed in them or that they didn’t realise the damage that would be done.
‘Proof that LDs, stopped transmission of Rona was weak’….they have no idea how anything is transmitted and that is a fact.
LDs had 0 to do with a flu. It was a pilot project. UK HSA was involved in its implementation. Unlikely that the criminals are going to condemn their criminal actions. And as the article says, the dead, injured, psychologically afflicted, the lost businesses, the outright terror propaganda against children and all us, the destruction of the economy, inflation….none of it is mentioned.
I am not sure what is happening here. But they could implement a climate lockdown. Or more likely we will be priced out of driving round. No need to have an explicit lockdown- too much restistance to that now I think. I could be wrong, but with a centralised parking app, and tracking of people etc, and no doubt a massive increase in costs of driving around, less people driving around. Hence, less wear and tear on the roads (Ok electric ars are heavier), less car accidents and hence strain on an under-resourced emergency services, and less congestion. What is there not to like (for the Goverments)?
This is what it was all about, the next stage in the game, the ‘vaccines’. Compliance was key. And yet Sweden never locked down but the citizens were somehow convinced that they needed a jab in 2021 despite surviving 2020 where they lived like normal people ( conveniently proving to the rest of the world that lockdowns and masks were unnecessary ) compared to the rest of the insane countries. Go figure! I won’t revisit that particular rant…The ”why” will have to be shelved along with ”why do cats purr?” I think. Let it go Mogs, let it go;
”SAFE AND EFFECTIVE LIES: 17,000 Scientists and Physicians confirm that Governments around the world along with Corporations willfully and deliberately lied to humanity about the Covid vaccines. They must be charged with fraud, wrongful advertising and mass negligent homicide.
The data now shows that the Covid vaccinated are more likely to become infected or have disease or even death if they have been Vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated people. The Covid Vaccines damage your heart, brain, reproductive tissue, lungs, increase cancer and permanently damage your immune system.
17,000 Physicians and Scientists demand that Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech, Janssen, AstraZeneca and their enablers be immediately indicted for fraud for willfully withholding and omitting Covid Vaccine safety information from patients and physicians which led to toxic death and injury to thousands of innocent people around the world.
This was not a mistake, this was a deliberate orchestrated plan to deceive you and manipulate you into taking a toxic experimental injection that was never given to humans before. Millions are injured and millions are dead. This is a global crime that must not go unpunished. Justice must be met, no matter what.”
https://twitter.com/SpartaJustice/status/1707472141480812925
“Let it go Mogs, let it go;”
There are just two things you can control – your emotions and your expenses.
Lead the sheep through example. For it is the sheep who unwittingly drive the most powerful force, that of convention. They’re always up for grabs, easily distracted and prone to group panic (very dangerous, that) but they’re generally lethargic and rather dim-witted.
Blar blar, still, not really news is it?
No
I stand corrected. Perhaps they would introduce lockdowns again, after watching this with Dr John Campbell https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UScNk39xUTk. Must be a multiple pronged attack on the people.
Thanks. 107662 at 10:26. The Gov response is typical: “We support targeted IHR amendments to ensure a suitable global framework to respond to international spread of disease. Parliament may scrutinise legislation relating to amendments accepted by the UK.” “Will” would be better than “may”!
However, it did present a lot of evidence about how vulnerable society is to crass over reaction by groups of zealots, bureaucrats, and incompetent politicos. The frequently used animal farming analogy is appropriate about the behaviour of the majority. To continue with that, we need more well trained dogs, like Border Collies, German Shepherds and so on to sort them out and manage them!
This myopic definition of “effectiveness”
When assessing a medical intervention “effectiveness” has always meant ability to reduce the disease. We do not take into account the social and economic consequences of a vaccine or drug when reporting its effectiveness, we just look at whether it reduces the disease. This is not to say that the social and economic consequences are not important or should not be studied – but both the UKHSA report and the Royal Society report were not looking at that.
The Royal Society report was global in scope and found evidence that some NPIs were effective. The UKHSA report was limited to the UK and found there was a lack of well designed studies. This could be reported as No Good Evidence Lockdown Workedor equally No Good Evidence Lockdown Failed
What’s the point of evidence when you can cobble together a computer model based on crappy code and fed wild assumptions?
Here’s looking at you Pantsdown Ferguson.
Wot …. didn’t work! Not even the Scotch Eggs? Well knock me down with a feather.