ONS caught pushing Government Propaganda
The ONS has published a new study on Covid deaths which it claims shows how few vaccinated people die of Covid. This was duly published by the media with headlines like he London Evening Standard's "Just 1% of Covid Deaths are in the Vaccinated". and the Telegraph's “Only 59 fully vaccinated people without serious health conditions died from COVID-19 out of more than 50,000 deaths in England this year, new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.”
The Telegraph goes on: 'In the first study of deaths by vaccination status, the ONS found that around 99% of COVID-19 deaths between January 2nd and July 2nd 2021 were in people who had not had two doses. Overall 640 (1.2%) of deaths were in those who had received both vaccine doses, but the ONS said many of those could have been infections picked up before the second dose. Just 256 deaths (0.5%) were considered true “breakthrough” infections where the second dose had long enough to work, but still did not offer protection. However, the average age of those “breakthrough” infections was 84 and the majority (76%) were classed as “extremely clinically vulnerable”. Just 59 did not have serious medical conditions.
But Public Health England's own figures report an entirely different outcome. What ONS have done is manipulate the figures for that '1%' headline. Although the data is presented as “this year” in fact the cut-off date is July 2nd. selecting arbitrary date ranges is standard trick for statisticians, we see this stunt with Climate Change, select a date range that supports your hypothesis and ignore everything else. The July 2nd cut off date is significant because it is just before the Delta surge hit. This means that the data almost exclusively comes from the Alpha surge, when virtually no-one was vaccinated and tens of thousands of Covid deaths were reported, and from the quiet spring and early summer when many were vaccinated but almost no-one died (see chart below).
In simple terms the ONS has presented data from the start of the year when the situation was entirely different, and palmed it off as being current. At the start of the year almost no-one was vaccinated, but the implication of the ONS report is that this is current and applies to only to the 'Refuseniks'
Comparing the number of deaths in the vaccinated and unvaccinated over this period and presenting it as a percentage is utterly meaningless but to imply it tells us anything about the effectiveness of the vaccines is a deliberate falsehood.
The idiot mainstream media have run the press release without questioning the data, and the Vaccine Nazis have leapt on it as truth.
The question should be: what is the death rate by vaccination status during the Delta surge, not prior to it ?
This shows that of 2,381 deaths in this period, 1,659 or 69.7%, more than two thirds, were in the double vaccinated. Six hundred deaths or 25.2% were in the unvaccinated. This is very different to the ONS statistics as quoted in the press that 99% of deaths were in those not double vaccinated. Yet no major media outlet compared or contrasted the ONS data with the PHE data released just days ago and asked why there was such a gaping discrepancy.
In the over-50s the picture is even worse, the PHE report showed that 1,621 of 2,222 deaths or 73% were in the double vaccinated compared to 499 or 22.5% in the unvaccinated. Once you take into account the proportions of the over-50s vaccinated and unvaccinated this works out at a vaccine effectiveness against death of 68.1%. - nothing like what the ONS are claiming.
What we have to understand from all of this is that the ONS is not some independent body that collects data for public record, it is simply another arm of the Government's Ministry of Truth, pushing the Government propaganda.