Thread by @drg1985

This isn't "BOMBSHELL NEWS🚨🚨🚨" - it is abuse of data to arrive at a conclusion, and naked grifting. This tactic is very common in antivaccine activism and really scares people, so lets look at why its utter nonsense, and how to spot it in the wild. A thread 🧵

...1st thing to note is that this refers to 4th dose, typically given to elderly & immunocompromised; people who, all things being equal, are far more likely to fall severely ill than younger people. If you look at the data, the most deaths are in the 90+ groups: not surprising.

..in any case, headlines like "OMG MORE DEATHS IN VACCINATED PEOPLE!!!111!!" commit a statistical cardinal sin; the base-rate fallacy. The critical information is, just how many are vaccinated? In Australia, the answer is virtually everyone..

..unsurprisingly, when vast majority of population is vaccinated, majority of deaths will occur in that cohort - even when vaccines are extremely effective. Here's a quick simulation I knocked up of vaccines 80% and 95% effective at reducing hospitalisations - notice something?

..at a certain point, majority of deaths happen in vaccinated cohorts solely because almost everyone is vaccinated, and nothing is 100% effective! This kind of reporting by grifters neglects that base-rate: it deliberately obscures it to scare people, comparing apples to bananas

This, btw, is the same tactic used when UK papers were screaming about 2/3 of deaths being in vaccinated populations; they forgot 95% were vaccinated, meaning that just 5% of people accounted for 33% of deaths. I covered this before on insta.. instagram.com/p/CTebbfWsTwa/

It gets worse, not content with one major unedifying blunder, Peter Sweden heroically mangles cause-and-effect, and wrongly claims that no vaccines = 0% chance of hospitalisation. There are literally primary school children who could explain to him why this is absolute nonsense..

..your risk of hospitalisation and death is, by the by, much bloody higher if you're not vaccinated. Which is precisely why most of us are vaccinated. That COVID vaccines have saved millions of lives is something these spin artists tellingly obscure..

thelancet.com/journals/lanin…

Vaccines are often victims of their own success for this reason: when they're effective, you don't even notice them. But do the folks spreading this nonsense actually know they're bending the data to support a dangerous fiction? I think they often do, and don't care

..in the comments to Peter's tweet, many point out precisely why he's wrong. As they have many times before. But they refuse to listen, & instead just torture data. I think here's a hint as to why: it is profitable. Millions of impressions, profitable substacks, huge audiences..

..spreading misinformation is both profitable, and garners people the currency of attention. Alex Berenson, a notorious anti-vaccine crank, has 10,000s of paid subscribers - recently lauded by Elon Musk, as @mehdirhasan wrote. Contrarianism is profitable

...The depressingly reality is that these people do not care about the truth: they care about getting clicks in, and don't give a damn about harms they cause. They start with a conclusion, and there's no data they won't bend to reach it. Especially as it benefits them. Be wary

I shall stop here, knowing full well that his corrective won't reach a fraction of the eyeballs that the original junk did, nor will it make me any money. But I do hope it's useful to someone, and reminds people that grifters thrive on scary claims and tortured data

Postscript: Axis labels displayed the wrong way in original tweet, corrected here for clarity...