Thread by @_johnbye

How disinformation works: HART's Clare Craig posted a Swiss graph showing covid hospitalisation rates by vaccination status. It suggests people who had a booster shot were more likely to end up in hospital with covid. But here's what she's not telling you... 🧵

1) The reason Clare Craig is only showing you 3 months of data is that hospitalisation rates were MUCH higher for unvaccinated people for the rest of the pandemic. Overall, you're much more likely to have ended up in hospital with covid at some point if you *weren't* vaccinated.

2) Booster shots in Switzerland were mostly given to older and more vulnerable people, as they're more likely to get seriously ill from covid. That means the graph she shared is seriously skewed - the vast majority of the oldest people are boosted and most young people aren't.

3) What makes this particularly dishonest on Clare Craig's part is that the page she shared actually breaks down hospitalisation rates by age group. And throughout the last 2 years hospitalisation rates for each group are higher in unvaccinated people and lower in boosted people.

4) Even if we cherry pick the data like Clare Craig did in her graph, and only look at the last 3 months of data available, people who had a booster shot (6+ months earlier) were *still* doing far better than the unvaccinated in the most boosted age groups.

5) Even if we drop down to younger groups, where booster shot uptake is lower and more focused on people with conditions that may make them particularly vulnerable to covid, people who had the booster were still doing slightly (50s) / much (60s) better than the unvaccinated.

So Clare Craig cherry picked a period that fit her narrative, hid the fact that the unvaccinated have far higher hospitalisation rates overall, and used data that's heavily skewed by age, when more detailed data on the same page shows the truth is the opposite of what she claims.