The truth is I’m a bit racked off with both Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and Tim Harford. I used to go out of my way to hear them on radio; they’re both gifted communicators. Indeed, anyone who can make a documentary about barbed wire a riveting listen – and Tim Harford does just that in his series “50 things that made the modern economy” – deserves all the accolades he gets. However, I wish they’d tidy up a bit behind themselves. I refer, of course, to the furore generated last September by Robert Peston’s tweet and President Bolsanaro’s subsequent use of the information to query whether the truth was that the unvaccinated were less likely to test positive for Covid than the vaccinated.

Why bring it up again now, eight months later? There are several reasons.
Firstly, though in general I’ve stopped listening to or watching any BBC output, I did hear a couple of minutes of the latest BBC Radio 4 More or Less episode where Tim Harford was dragging some unfortunate WHO statistician over the coals for having the temerity to suggest that Germany had done less well than the U.K. in the Covid league of death. It’s not as if he hasn’t got a few things wrong over the past few months himself. People in glass houses, and all that.
Secondly, in a good natured discussion with a doctor friend of mine about the efficacy of vaccines (yes, people can disagree without irrevocably falling out) I mentioned that the last data provided by the UKHSA showing the prevalence of Covid infections in the unvaccinated in comparison to the vaccinated showed that the vaccinated in the 40-49 year-old cohort were more than four times more likely to test positive for Covid than the unvaccinated. She laughed and said she knew all about this. She told me that Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, no less, Chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge, had done a thorough demolition of this canard last year. Certainly, to her my argument had been shot down in flames. That annoyed me because we now know Spiegelhalter’s confidence in the efficacy of vaccines against transmission was wrong, yet he’s done nothing to clarify this – a bit remiss for someone whose very job description includes the words ‘risk’ and ‘communication’.
Thirdly, I think the fact checkers need fact checking. Full Fact had done a piece on this which with hindsight we can see was hopelessly premature and yet they too have failed to correct their now apparent error.
Fourthly, I contacted both Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and the More or Less programme asking whether they would revisit this issue, and while I had a very polite response from the Professor declining the invitation I’ve still heard nothing from More or Less so I thought I’d better set the record straight for them.
Finally, and most importantly, this issue highlights all too well the disservice that the UKHSA is doing us all by stopping the publication of real world data and only publishing weighted data in its (no longer weekly) vaccine surveillance reports. This episode illustrates the deficiencies of weighting and shows how data can be manipulated when they’re obfuscated. Without the raw data, Spiegelhalter and Harford couldn’t have mounted their critiques and I couldn’t have mounted this riposte. Raw data serve all sides.
Let’s go back to the beginning and the furore caused by Robert Peston’s initial tweet that set this particular hare running. This was followed by an attempted takedown by Leo Benedictus of Full Fact after President Bolsanaro of Brazil quoted the same numbers and an article in the Guardian by Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter and Anthony Masters published on September 19th 2021. In addition, the BBC Radio 4 programme on More or Less covered the story on Sept 15th 2021, featuring a discussion between presenter Tim Harford and mathematician James Ward which concluded that the vaccines were very effective and that there was nothing to see here. The show also informed us that ITV had deleted the Peston tweet.
In their Guardian piece, Spiegelhalter and Masters wrote:
The surprise came from the reported case rate per 100,000 population being higher for fully vaccinated people (1,116) aged 40 to 49 than for unvaccinated (880), which appears to question the effectiveness of the vaccines. But the problem is that we don’t know how many people have not been vaccinated, because we don’t know how many people live in England.
I’ve reproduced below the table from the UKHSA week 36 vaccine surveillance report, which was also shown in Peston’s original tweet. You can see the numbers quoted by Spiegelhalter for the infection rate by vaccine status per 100,000 in the last two columns circled in orange and blue and the raw number of infections by vaccine status in columns two and four. Of course, the number of infections in the vaccinated 40-49 year-olds is the total less the infections in the unvaccinated, 97,881 – 15,106 = 82,775.

The good Professor went on to explain:
PHE uses National Immunisation Management System (NIMS) estimates of 8.1 million adults aged 40 to 49 in England. These numbers depend on GP records and tend to overcount. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) also produces population estimates, based on the 2011 census, migration and death registrations and estimates 7.1 million adults in that age group, a million fewer than NIMS.
Up to September 5th, NHS England reported 6.4 million people in that age group had received a COVID-19 vaccine dose. So the ONS population estimate leaves about 700,000 unvaccinated people aged 40 to 49, while using NIMS means 1.7 million. This is a massive difference.
Let’s see what that massive difference does to the infection rate per 100,000 using the two different population estimates:

The infection rate in the vaccinated doesn’t change whether the NIMS or ONS data are used; it stays at 1,116 per 100,000. All the error is concentrated in the unvaccinated. From the figures above we can see that using NIMS data the infection rate goes from the reported 880 per 100,000 to 2,137 per 100,000, almost 2.5 times what was reported and almost two times the rate of the vaccinated. Simply put, the same number of infections are spread among a smaller group of people if we use the ONS population estimate.
Well, let’s now roll forward 29 weeks to the UKHSA vaccine surveillance report of week 13 2022 to see how these criticisms have played out over time. This was a special week because it was the last time that the UKHSA reported raw data.

Let’s just remind ourselves that this table shows infections by vaccine status for the prior four weeks. You can see circled in blue that 15,437 of the infections in the 40-49 age cohort were amongst the unvaccinated, up 331 (2%) from the 15,106 amongst the unvaccinated back in September 2021. Whereas amongst the vaccinated there had been 238,155 infections (253,592 – 15,437). That’s 155,380 (187%) higher than in September 2021 (238,155 – 82,775) and, let’s not forget, in the meantime many of this age group had had a third vaccine dose. Isn’t that amazing, the rate of increase in infections was about 90 times greater in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
Just to nail the point, let’s also look at the change in infection rates per 100,000. The table below shows the infection rate in the triple vaccinated compared to the not-vaccinated from the week 13 2022 UKHSA vaccine surveillance report.

The triple vaccinated are apparently 4.1 times more likely to test positive than the unvaccinated among the 40-49 year-old cohort (3,957 ÷ 955 = 4.1). Aha! Spiegelhalter, Harford and Full Fact might cry, but again you haven’t corrected for the NIMS/ONS issue. Okay, let’s do that. As you can see below, even if we use the ONS population data, the triple vaccinated were 1.7 times (3,958 ÷ 2,320) more likely to test positive for Covid than the unvaccinated.

In the 29 weeks since the week 36 report, the vaccination rate amongst the 40-49 year-olds is much the same yet the incidence of infection in the triple-vaccinated has increased markedly.
As I mentioned, the UKHSA no longer publishes any raw data so it’s increasingly hard to verify claims, but perhaps it is just worth testing the view expressed by the More or Less team in the September 15th episode, that despite the vaccines not providing complete protection against infection they do still prove very efficacious against death. Well let’s have a look.
Table 7 is reproduced from the week 13 2022 UKHSA vaccine surveillance report. It shows the number of deaths by vaccine status by age cohort. These are raw figures, not deaths per 100,000. As you can see, among those aged over 40, 300 of the 4,005 deaths were of unvaccinated people, that’s 7.5%. Surely, if the vaccines were efficacious you’d expect the unvaccinated death rate to be higher than that of the vaccinated.

Below, I’ve shown the percentage of deaths against the percentage of those unvaccinated using both NIMS and ONS population data.

You can look at the individual age cohorts if you care to but I’ll just comment on the total. At best, using Spiegelhalter and More or Less’s preferred ONS population (which is actually well-known for under-counting the population, even, as the UKHSA itself has pointed out, resulting in some age cohorts having greater than 100% vaccination coverage), 6% of the deaths in the over-40s cohort are not vaccinated yet they only account for 7% of the deaths, hardly a ringing endorsement for vaccination.
If we use the NIMS population data (which the UKHSA calls the “gold standard” for this purpose), 12% of them are unvaccinated, yet only 7% of deaths were of the unvaccinated. Is this why UKHSA stopped reporting the raw data, because they showed that, at best the vaccines appeared to make no difference in the proportion of deaths and at worst appear to show that the unvaccinated are far less likely to die?
Can we expect More or Less to have another look at the data or Professor Spiegelhalter to write another article for the Guardian? No, I don’t think so either. But even they would have to admit that it’s all a bit rum. Still, perhaps Robert Peston or President Bolsanaro will retweet this article.
This article has been updated to correct two calculation errors. The overall argument is unaffected.
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This is an absolute disgrace, a serious charge which requires an explanation to Parliament.
But it is pretty clear what so many democratic socialist governments across the world have been up to.
‘…..using psychological remoulding as a tactic for political hegemony’
After all, it is not as though this kind of power grab hasn’t happened before:
‘……revolutionary ideals had to be protected from weeds of doubt by vigorous assertion and mass coercion…….people were attached to the new order primarily through terror or emotional appeal’
https://jsis.washington.edu/ellisoncenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/05/dome_REECASNW.pdf
The title of this referenced article?
‘A Timid Flock: Investigating Propaganda Under Stalin’
Plus ca change……..
The title of another article :
“Investigating the right-wing free market theology’s tendency to fascism”
Fascism is inherently MARXIST.
That fascism is right wing is the biggest lie the left ever told, and they’ve told some whopping lies.
“Fascism is inherently MARXIST.”
I know people can’t necessarily being incredibly thick and deluded.
But it does seem odd to want to advertise the fact 🙂
Do try to find out what terms vaguely mean.
100% correct. The word ‘fascism’ derives from ‘fasces’, latin for bundle, so collectivism.
Oh!!! The brightness of political and linguistic insight shines from the goldfish bowl!
Just go and preach your irrelevant and nonsensical obsessions elsewhere, and leave this site for intelligent discussion and information.
‘…leave this site for intelligent discussion and information’
But not from you, as usual. How very Cummings/Johnsonian……
You should be in the cabinet…
Far better to stay there out of the sun unless you have any useful contribution to make.
Silly vapours do you no credit.
Fascism
“Everything inside the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.”
Mussolini.
Sounds a tad hostile to free exchange, markets, private treatment in fact everything that creates wealth.
Well – that’s an exercise of a small brain, using ‘Mussolini’ and ‘state’ as cues to defy logic.
In actuality, (and factually) the platform for this outbreak of totalitarianism has more to do with Hayek’s with Marx. It’s a creature of unregulated neoliberal global capitalism, not some vague ‘socialist’ conspiracy – i.e an infection from the bug-eyed right rather than the cross-eyed left.
‘…..unregulated neoliberal global capitalism’
Loving the humour.
Here’s some bedtime reading:
‘In the preface to The Limits of the Market, Paul De Grauwe, an economics professor at the London School of Economics, begins with two basic premises: first, that a centrally planned economy does not work; second, that pure market systems do not exist anywhere.’
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2018/limits-market-pendulum-between-government-market-paul-de-grauwe
‘Rather than augmenting private governance, government is often the primary obstacle. Government often crowds out, restricts, or co-opts providers of private governance and forces them to pursue government’s objectives. In some markets the government imposes rules and regulations that providers of private governance would have adopted on their own. Commonly, however, government imposes rules and regulations with little regard for whether they actually benefit market participants. Like price controls that interfere with supply and demand equilibration, government rules and regulations interfere with the searches for beneficial rules and regulations by providers of private governance.’
‘Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life’
Edward Peter Stringham
Thought that might get the odd goldfish with little brain but big mouth to bite 🙂
It was never the government’s intention to save people from dying.
A cynical person might wonder if the old and infirm were intentionally targeted to ease the burden on the pension and social security systems.
Hmm, I’m dubious about that – consider the cost of £400 billion and counting! The old and infirm are just a small collateral ‘benefit’, CONTROL is the real target.
Everyome who dies of cancer DIDN’T die of covid. Which is good.
Oh well, if it was only cancer they were threatened with.
Only a slow, agonising death from a disease that can strike at any age.
Not as if it was something serious, like the covvisniffle.
I wonder just how many were killed by the systemic failure of N”H”S?
The worst thing was so many could not even get better by going private as the bureaucrats had co-opted private hospitals and done nowt with them.
“the systemic failure of N”H”S”
No. It’s the systemic failure of the Tory Party in government, not the NHS.
… and the idea that private provision is somehow naturally better is ludicrous to anyone who’s seen both in action. Pure delusion.
I’ve endured both the extortion-funded ration of treatment and the exceptional service, care and attention I’ve had when I paid.
You are frankly barking if you think the NHS is good for anything except lying about how many people its managed to put 6 feet under.
You are talking absolute crap.
I’ve had a massive amount of NHS treatment in the last decade. Not uniformly perfect – but exceptionally good in the main. A far better sample than your doctrinal pronouncements.
Neighbour : two private assaults on spinal injury from the private sector before the NHS put it right.
The latter not a good random sample – but certainly enough to put to bed any simplistic notions about the natural superiority of private provision.
Sorry – Covmaniacs/’Free’ market shut-eyed obsessives/Tooting Trots and SWP etc. : they’re all bug-eyed nonsense gabblers with more in common with each other than rational thinkers.
Perhaps the answer is for obsessives here to get together with their soul-mates on Skwawkbox and just waste their mutual time on shouting bug-eyed nonsense at each other.
Aha you must’ve got some healthy person to parasite upon.
After all those who look after their health pay more than twice for their inadequate ration of treatment. First for their own, then for the malingerer, then because the NHS subsidises and thus encourages health failure the restrictions on choice because the feckless externalise their poor choices on the healthy.
The duggies still snapping in fury at reality.
Hey up! The duggies without brain getting excited again! 🙂
… and again.
The goldfish mouths still opening and closing to order as they defend the coup by Johnson and his right-wing mates 🙂
Go see a doctor about your spluttering over the keyboard when you are allowed to by the health bureaucracy.
I think you’ve now proved my point sufficiently re. unintelligent beating of the battered drums of non-think.
BTW – Being a performing twat is not really a good look for responding convincingly to evidence that doesn’t suit your limited preconceptions.
Hi, Rick. Please give it a rest.
If someone is holding a gun to my head while stealing my wallet, my feelings towards him are unlikely to be influenced by his voting intentions.
I suggest we postpone discussions about the political genesis of the covid fraud while we work on recovering our freedom.
The dictatorships propaganda unit is saying a winter respiratory illness will be rampant on mid summers day
Of course it will
oh but wait two weeks!!!
I find it incredible that no one in this government could have foreseen the impact that enforcing a national lockdown along with a campaign of endless psychological fear-driven propaganda would have on public behaviour whereby those with other serious medical symtoms requiring early treatments for diseases that are far more fatal than covid19 were either too scared to leave their homes, to afraid to go to hospital or even unable get a doctors appointment because of the covid paranoia that was deliberately whipped-up by this government to ensure public compliance.
This was criminal negligence on a massive scale.
Heads must roll for this – prosecutions and jail sentences..
How people can be so dumb to think that you can concentrate all of your resources into one fairly insignificant illness, then claim that you’ve “saved” lives baffles me.
British Citizen Entrance Exam 2021
Question One
If the British were robbed of their liberty would they
a Buy a dog
b Buy a Volkswagen camper van
c Vote for their tormentors
d All of the above
e Blame a left wing conspiracy for the actions of a government of the right.
The Conservatives aren’t in power in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, are they?
And the idea that this government is “of the right” is just ludicrous: they have no policies or principles that I can support, which is why for the first time ever in a GE I didn’t vote for them at the last one.
“And the idea that this government is “of the right” is just ludicrous: they have no policies that I can support,”
That only proves how weird and solipsistic some of the right has become in their fantasy land of loony political definition. Totally detached from reality.
I have been – I confess – taking the piss out of this sort of loopy detachment from reality and cult of denial (not difficult).
But there is a point behind it which isn’t funny. The association of lockdown scepticism with the shit-for-brains loony right simply opens the door to satire and dismissal. It simply does the job of 77th Brigade without them doing anything, as ludicrous notions are used to nullify opposition.
Meanwhile, the real political aims of the establishment – embracing both Tories and the captured non-opposition walk away scot-free with their fabrication and the imposition of a police state.
It is continually manufacturing grist for the Covid mill – not opposition, and making it harder for the rational case to get through when such utter bollocks is easily cited by the Covid zealots, and used to deter potential allies.
Playground stuff – not great intelligence!
Why do people need studies to make them believe what they can see for themselves is true?