Misinterpretation of Scottish Vaccine Data
Today’s Medium article write-up will go into the recent claims that surfaced from Scottish vaccine data that the vaccines have “negative” efficacy thus AVers falsely claims this means the vaccines do not work and more likely to get Covid-19 if you’ve been jabbed (highly false). Without further ado, let’s get into the article.
➡ What is efficacy?
For a simple explanation, the term efficacy refers to how well something performs in ideal and controlled conditions i.e. a vaccine trial for instance. This is different to effectiveness, which is the real-world performance of a health intervention such as a vaccine. [1]
Reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3912314/
➡ Misinterpreting the Scottish Data
For a vaccine to even have “negative efficacy” the vaccine would need to increase the risk of Covid-19, not reduce the risk of Covid-19. It’s as not simple as comparing unvaccinated vs vaccinated groups using the PHS data. There are more differences between the groups other than simply their vaccination status, and the report itself says comparing the two groups should not be used to rate the effectiveness of the vaccine. [1]
The UK Health Security Agency has laid out a few examples of this:
People who are fully vaccinated may be more likely to get tested, which means they are likely to appear in positive case data.
Those who were vaccinated first were those at the biggest risk from Covid-19 because of their age, job or health conditions, so even with an effective vaccine, a proportion of these people will still end up with significant Covid-19 symptoms.
People who haven’t been vaccinated are more likely to have caught Covid-19 already, giving them a measure of natural immunity to the virus.
Vaccinated and unvaccinated people may behave in different ways, and put themselves at different levels of risk of infection.
This would also show someone’s logical fallacy if these are not considered and people are merely assuming the data they see on graphs without knowing anything else.
As Dr Diane Stockton a Consultant at Public Health Scotland says in this blog why simply using comparisons of COVID-19 rates in vaccinated vs unvaccinated shouldn’t be used to completely dismiss the vaccine's effectiveness or prevention of severe disease, hospitalisations and death.
“Interpreting these simple statistics can be complex, and these simple comparisons of COVID-19 case rates in those who are vaccinated and unvaccinated should not be used to assess how effective a vaccine is in preventing serious health outcomes.” [2]
PHS also goes on to state — “A higher overall number of COVID-19 related deaths among people who are vaccinated compared to those who are unvaccinated can be seen in current weekly reporting due to the fact that over 90% of individuals in Scotland are fully vaccinated against COVID-19”, it said in an email. “For those aged 50 and over, this is at almost 100%.”
This also means the dates referenced within this graph [3], shows to us that there were 261 double vaccinated hospital admissions, out of 3.4 million people who had received both doses, which we all know is a very low rate of hospitalisations. Whilst in the unvaccinated group, there were 153 admissions out of 1 million unvaccinated people. This means that 8 out of every 100,000 fully vaccinated individuals were hospitalised in comparison to 15 out of every 100,000 unvaccinated individuals that were hospitalised.
To conclude this section multiple studies have shown that vaccination is effective against the Omicron variant and having a 3rd or booster would also prove very effective too. [4]
References: [1] https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2021/11/02/transparency-and-data-ukhsas-vaccines-report/
[2] https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/our-blog/2022/january/phs-reporting-of-cases-hospitalisations-and-deaths-from-covid-19-by-vaccine-status-interpreting-the-data/
[3] https://publichealthscotland.scot/media/8946/21-09-01-covid19-publication_report.pdf
[4] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/by-the-numbers-covid-19-vaccines-and-omicron#2-dose-Pfizer-vaccine-vs.-Omicron
➡ Conclusion
As we can see, AV laymen’s who have a very flimsy grasp on science will always be clutching at straws, misusing science jargon, misinterpreting data and using logical inconsistencies to prove a baseless point.
💥 Thanks for reading, Lawrence. Please consider a small contribution, in the form of a beer as all articles are created in my small amount of spare time: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/LawrenceRob