Whenever a country makes clean data available that highlights worrying patterns, we inevitably see something like this next.
Here's what Scotland is silencing:
@fvbirder asks about vaccination rates. This blog seems to have good data: spice-spotlight.scot/2022/02/16/cor…
I've not made noise about this data so far because my intent is not to highlight one country and turn it into a global conclusion. But when data is being manipulated in such obvious ways, we must assume that what we are allowed to see is basically public relations as this point.
Data from the latest (and final?) batch of numbers Scotland is going to publish by vaccination status.
This right here is the brainworm. "if you slice by X or Y you'll see what I hope you'll see".
Except if that were true you'd see them release *more* granular data.
What they're doing is releasing *less* granular data instead.
Not exactly reassuring.
Here's *age standardized* numbers. They appear to show the 2 dose group being worse off than the unvaccinated and 1 dose groups. I see why they'd stop publishing it. Correcting for age doesn't seem to make things look any better.
More from the (soon to be silent) Scottish dataset.
I see many comments about confounders etc. I agree. It's frustrating. This data does not conclusively say that the vaccines do or don't help.
It would be nice to have some RCTs but if everyone agrees on something it's that the RCTs showed us a false picture of efficacy. Oops.
What I think is happening is that we're seeing a cleanup before the inevitable capitulation, to obscure what can be obscured in the hopes things don't get worse.
And I think the markets know.
Fantastic interview by @freddiesayers for @unherd:
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