Vaccines statistics in the cognitive quagmire of social media

This week I tried to post some sensible information on a Facebook group that seems to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 misinformation. I got a response from someone who was convinced that vaccination was causing more deaths than it saves so I tried to respond to the statistics that he had posted in the hope that he better informed to make life saving health choices for himself and people that he comes in contact with.

Clearly that wasn't to be so I thought that I would turn this Facebook conversation into a blog post in case anyone else was confronted by a similar argument.

So I am a member of a popular Australian FB group that I presumed promoted critical thinking. I had noticed a lot anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination and COVID-19 denial sentiment creeping into the posts there and I thought that I would share this article, How do vaccinated people spread Delta? What the science says, from Nature about the transmissibility of the Delta strain by vaccinated people because Nidhi Subbaraman had written an informative piece that gave a good overview of what is currently known about this emerging problem.

The next day I got this reply from someone - let's call him "Arthur Story".

In the last 6 months 31k people died in UK within 21 days form vaccination. Remember that UK counts as a covid-19 death if it occurs within 28 days from a positive test. Stupid, I know, but same criteria should apply for deaths after vaccination, right? The figure is scary nevertheless. Look  it up. https://www.ons.gov.uk/.../deathsoccurringbetween2january.... Also read this https://theexpose.uk/.../30k-people-died-within-21-days.../

A friend of mine was quick to respond with the obvious epidemiological observation, but this was ignored.

"what percentage of them would have died anyway of old age or some shit?"

Arthur continued and posted me a screenshot from The Exposé article, 30,305 people died within 21 days of having a Covid-19 Vaccine in England during the first 6 months of 2021 according to ONS data

Seriously, read this and tell me well these vaccines work.

I responded by saying:

Arthur Story from a glance at that page vaccines look highly effective. Only a tiny fraction of the deaths occur in unvaccinated people.
What those stats are telling me is that UK IQs are going up.

Now I wasn't insinuating that Arthur was himself and idiot, but he seemed to take it that way.

Chris Guest That's what you read in table 5? I hope you can read, here it is: "Table 5 of Public Health England’s ‘Vaccine Surveillance Report’ found here, shows that between August 9th and September 5th 2021 there were 600 Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated population, 97 deaths among the partly vaccinated population, and 1,659 deaths among the fully vaccinated population." Only someone with substandard IQ would conclude that 1,756 is a tiny fraction of 2,356 while 600 is the vast majority.

Table 1

I responded by interpreting the figures in Table 1 of the excerpt from The Exposé article.

So among the 104134 (38964+65170) of deaths amongst unvaccinated people, 38964 or 37.4% of deaths involved Covid19.
Amongst the 69373 (11470+57263+182+458) deaths amongst completely vaccinated people, 640 (182+458) or 0.92% involved Covid19.

Now that I am taking the time to lay this out on my own blog, I can post these statistics in a more diagrammatic form and include the omitted partially vaccinated cohort.

I would have thought that this explanation was enough to allay Arthur's fears, but I got no reply.

Table 5

Then I took a look at the data that was presented in Table 5. I will expand my argument here for the sake of clarity and formatting, but my original post is visible in the screenshot at the bottom. My original response mistakenly used population figures for the whole of the United Kingdom instead of just England  so I have corrected this error. These corrections do not alter the conclusions to be drawn.

The claim in The Exposé article is that:

Table 5 of Public Health England’s ‘Vaccine Surveillance Report’ found here, shows that between August 9th and September 5th 2021 there were 600 Covid-19 deaths among the unvaccinated population, 97 deaths among the partly vaccinated population, and 1,659 deaths among the fully vaccinated population.

The data that appears in Table 5 of Public Health England's 'Vaccine Surveillance Report' contains raw figures.

In England at present 71.51% of the population is fully vaccinated and 28.48% is unvaccinated. I sourced this with data from the the "NHS Region" tab of the spreadsheet, COVID-19 weekly announced vaccinations 9 September 2021, on the NHS England site. I picked this particular data set as it is sourced from the 8th December 2020 through to the 5th September 2021 and matches the end date of the mortality data used in The Exposé article. I used the latest population estimate of 56.223 million as of 1st July from Population UK.

Vaccination is demographically skewed towards older people or people with other health conditions. When it comes to over-18s, the percentage is even higher: 81% fully vaccinated, 89% at least one vaccine [1].

In fact the Exposé article states as much:

"So far, more than 48 million people have had a first vaccine dose - 89% of over-16s - and more than 44 million - 81% of over-16s - have had both doses"

So excluding the three unvaccinated children from those mortality figures in Table 5, we have:

• 569 deaths unvaccinated
• 97 partially vaccinated
• 1659 deaths fully vaccinated

Now if we take the figures of 36 023 747 fully vaccinated adults and 3 384 723 partially vaccinated adults provided by the NHS England spreadsheet above and derive an unvaccinated figure of 4 206 436 from the population estimate we can calculate the deaths per 100 000 as in the table below.

The obvious reason that the death rate is lower amongst partially vaccinated people than the fully vaccinated is a demographic one. The vast majority of the 80+ age group are fully vaccinated and they account for 1119 deaths as you would expect since English life expectancy was about 81.5 years prior to COVID-19.

In fact Table 5 gives death rates broken down by age and vaccine cohort and the obvious lower mortality rate amongst the fully vaccinated is apparent across all ages. Unsurprisingly, neither The Exposé author or Arthur grasped the vital importance of this information.

Response

So after I explained the statistics to Arthur, with the hope that he might grasp the significant life saving impacts that vaccination is providing in the current crisis, I received a prompt response saying:

I see, you can't read that table 5 or you simply won't. Enjoy your day.

To which I explained:

I just used the contents of Table 5 in terms of UK demographics to explain the death rates per cohort, but you seem to lack the comprehension to appreciate this.

My interlocutor doubled down:

Chris Guest Sure. As I said, have a nice day.

I was out of polite words by this stage but Arthur carried on conversing by using tropes like:

Natural immunity is 27 times better than a vaccine according to Israel data analysis of 700k subjects. If you are in a risk group, by all means, get vaccinated.

It struck me that although Arthur was taking the time to comment in grammatical sentences he wasn't taking the time to synthesise information or comprehend my responses. His initial mind was made up by the raw mortality numbers and he was oblivious to any demographic contextualisation of them.

The mindset here is that as soon as he finds a statistic that fits his worldview he sticks with it. This is Arthur "doing his own research", being "entitled to his own opinions" that he doesn't get from the "Mainstream media".

It is not obvious to me how to break through this hubris. Sometimes I have had discussions that have led to that penny drop and the "a-ha moment", but other times it seems that people aren't ready to revisit their reasoning or change their beliefs.

1. I derived this 18+ figure using the estimate of 21% 18+ from Age groups - GOV.UK Ethnicity facts and figures.

Photo credit, Daniel Schludi  https://unsplash.com/photos/mAGZNECMcUg