Vaccination data update

I did a long interview with Sonia Elijah for TrialSiteNews (covering the latest work in this report) that is now on their website: "Is the UK Office of National Statistics manipulating the data on deaths involving Covid-19 by vaccination status?"

A tweet by @alan_wyse contains this letter from in response to a Freedom of Information request.

(The original FOI request and response is on the Blackpool Teaching Hospital's Trust website so there is no reason to believe this additional reponse is not genuine). The letter exposes - on a small but important scale - much of what we have been saying about the misrepresentation and manipulation of data comparing vaccinated v unvaccinated.

• How massively exaggerated are claims about unvaccinated dominating Covid hospitalizations. The original FOI request already revealed the extent to which widespread claims that 'the vast majority of patients with Covid are unvaccinated' are wrong: it stated that only 14 out of the 182 patients hospitalized with Covid in Blackpool Victoria on 22 Jan 2022 were unaccinated (i.e. over 92% were vaccinated).

• How the data on the vaccinated is continually changed and manipulated. When it was pointed out that the data seemed to be suggesting that NONE of the vaccinated patients had been triple vaccinated, the hospital conceded that there had been '1 small error' which just happened to be the fact that 130 of those who had been previously classified as having 2 doses, had in fact had three doses (and there was indeed there were two other genuinely small errors, namely that 162 and not 161 as previously stated had at least 2 doses, while only 13 rather than 14 were unvaccinated). So in total 93% were vaccinated and:

  • 7% were vaccine-free (a more accurate term than 'unvaccinated')

  • 4% had one dose

  • 17.6% had two doses

  • 71.4% had 3 doses

Here is the Government's latest data today on proportion of people vaccinated in Blackpool:

Note that this is dated 5 Feb, so the proportion of triple vaccinated on 22 Jan will have been lower that the 56.9% currently showing. Whichever way you look at it the vaccinated - and especially the triple vaccinated are disproportionately being hospitalized with Covid.

Now ideally the data need to be adjusted for age and ill health, especially as it may be the case that the triple vaccinated were the most vulnerable. Indeed we have always considered such confounders in our research. However, it is extremely important to point out that, after we revealed anomalies in the ONS vaccine surveillance data, the ONS curiously argued that the anomalies were explained by the fact that it was the MOST vulnerable who are LEAST LIKELY to be vaccinated (the so-called healthy vaccinee effect). See our report on this.