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I have no doubt that this post is going to ruffle some feathers, all the way to the top of The BFD, but there it is. The BFD, after all, takes pride in presenting a range of viewpoints, and always stands to be corrected. Well, my author bio doesn’t say “contrarian” for nothing.
We all know that the government, the media and the public health bureaucracy have lied to us and bamboozled a great many people with dodgy, mangled statistics and endless scare-mongering. That should absolutely be challenged.
But equal and opposite scare-mongering and mangled statistics are not the answer. Nor is joining in an echo chamber that clangs as emptily as any Covidian’s.
Before I go further, let’s get some inevitable, incorrect assumptions dealt with: no, I do not support vaccine mandates or coercion. Nor, indeed, any form of covid mandates or restrictions. No one who’s read a single word I’ve written on these matters could possibly think otherwise. I’m also concerned about what appear to be unusually high rates of side effects for the covid vaccines.
To that end, it’s entirely laudatory that NZ’s Ministry of Health is conducting a study into possible long-term health effects of the vaccine. Yes, it can very rightly be argued that such studies should have been undertaken before the vaccine roll-out — but only if we completely ignore the context in which it was. The world was clamouring for vaccines — as fast as possible. To this end, then-President Trump announced “Operation Warp Speed”. Lest there be any misapprehension, Trump was “Very, very happy that we were able to get things done at a level that nobody has ever seen before. The gold standard vaccine has been done in less than nine months”.
This was a conveniently-forgotten era when the consensus across the political divide was united.
Any government that refused, or even delayed, acquiring and rolling out the new Wonder Drugs of the Ages was damned, left, right and centre. Lest anyone forget, even the BFD published posts roundly criticising the Ardern government’s delays in acquiring vaccines.
But the safety or otherwise of the vaccines is not my focus, here. I’m happy to admit that, right now, I don’t know enough to say either way. I suspect that the covid vaccines have higher-than-usual rates of serious side effects. I’m far less convinced that there’s a sudden wave of death and disability linked to the vaccines. As for conspiracy theories that Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab are engineering a mass genocide-by-vaccine… spare me.
What I am going to point out are the mangled statistics in Cam’s article, which parley into another meme that rules supreme in anti-mandate/covid vax circles: that the vaccines don’t work and the virtuous unvaccinated are triumphing over the duped vaccinated. This is a narrative just as ill-informed as any triple-vaxxed Believer demanding the ousting of the unvaccinated from every corner of society.
To repeat: equal and opposite scare-mongering and mangled statistics are not the answer.
The facts say that if you are vaccinated, either partially, fully or boosted, then you actually have a greater chance of getting the virus than an unvaccinated person. Moreover, the rate of vaccinated getting the virus is more than double those who are unvaccinated.
What to make of this? Firstly, comparing rates for each different group is a good start. But, what does it tell us? The idea that fully-vaccinated people are uniquely susceptible to the very virus they’re vaccinated against is a curious one — which is fine: statistics often bring to light curious anomalies. But this one seems hard to justify. Surely, at worst if the vaccines are “useless” as their critics insist (and indeed, rapidly waning efficacy is a genuine issue), the rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated should be roughly the same?
The fact that the vaccinated are apparently catching the virus at more than twice the rate of the unvaccinated requires another explanation. Critics might argue that the vaccines actually make people more susceptible to the virus, but this is an extraordinary claim — and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
On the other hand, as I have consistently argued, “cases” is an almost-meaningless and absolutely misleading statistic. What it really means is “people who have officially returned a positive test”. It does not mean “sick people”. So, using such a useless statistic to make an extraordinary claim is a dubious tactic. To quote Cam’s own words, “No matter how many times you’d like to make the claim […] that won’t make the claim come true”.
It seems much more likely that the sort of people who are resolutely opposed to being vaccinated are also probably the least likely to line up for a covid test. Yes, this is an assumption, but given how often the anti-mandate types mock — with good reason! — the “sheeple” lining up for covid tests, it seems a solid assumption.
Given also that “asymptomatic cases” are so common, it’s not beyond reason that there’s a massive cohort of the unvaccinated who are quite likely “cases”, but just haven’t been tested and therefore aren’t showing up in statistics. If the vaccinated similarly stopped being routinely tested, almost certainly “cases” would plummet.
(Again, to forestall obvious attacks: I don’t think anyone should be routinely tested. The only people who should be tested are the symptomatic and, at most, close contacts of cases.)
But it’s the next argument that really goes off-kilter.
The next claim, that if you do get it, you are less likely to have a bad case, is likewise unprovable. There is no way this can be proved unless we all have a clone and infect that clone simultaneously and measure the differences. It is a fallacy, and can never be proven. Again the hospitalisation and death statistics make a lie of this fallacy.
On its own, this argument is self-contradictory. If it’s “a fallacy, and can never be proven”, then it can likewise not be disproven. Ergo, statistics cannot make a lie of it.
The statistics in fact prove that the claim is demonstrably true. For hospitalisations and deaths, the unvaccinated indeed come off far, far worse.
What seems to have happened, here, is that the data has switched from a rate to absolute numbers. Absolute numbers are often a trap for the unwary. If 10 people out of a group of 100 are sick, and 10 people out of a group of 20 are also sick, it’s easy to see that the second group are far worse off.
As you can see cases are massively lop-sided now, and sure people like ‘John’ will argue that there are more vaccinated people so it stands to reason more are infected. But that too is a fallacy, because when the vaccines were pushed you were all told that you wouldn’t catch it, and if you did you wouldn’t get sick or die. ‘John’ repeated this in his first statement.
For starters, Cam has straw-manned John. John did not say “you wouldn’t catch it, and if you did you wouldn’t get sick or die”. John said “less likely”: this is absolutely true, as simply adjusting the absolute numbers to a rate shows.
The data is therefore absolutely clear: being vaccinated or boosted makes it nearly one-third less likely that you will be hospitalised from covid. Being fully vaccinated makes you one-quarter as likely to die. Being boosted only improves that to about half as likely, but given that the most vulnerable are also the most likely to be boosted might skew that figure.
The last paragraph of ‘John’s’ statement is that the risks of the vaccine are outweighed by the benefits.
The BFD
This may be arguable, but deriding John for correctly stating that vaccination improves outcomes for hospitalisations and deaths flies in the face of the data.
Old mate John and I have had some vociferous disagreements in the BFD’s comments over the last two years, but in this case, I have to admit that he is absolutely right about the benefits of the vaccines. Whether he’s right about the risks outweighing them, I can’t say. This is why I’ve left it beyond the scope of this rebuttal.
