How to Lie While Telling the Truth: This Time on Vaccination Effectiveness
I have had two previous posts on people using a true statement to mislead, one on religion, one on the effects of climate change. This is the third.
99% of COVID deaths are now of unvaccinated people, experts say
And, from a different story:
More than 99% of recent deaths were among the unvaccinated, infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said earlier this month on NBC's Meet the Press,
Such claims struck me as implausible. The estimated effectiveness of the vaccines used in the U.S. is about 95%. Since a majority of adults, and a large majority of those most vulnerable, are vaccinated, one would expect more than 5% of those dying to be vaccinated. It might be somewhat lower if more of the unvaccinated are located in areas with higher than average infection rates but it would be surprising if it was that much lower.
The solution appears part way down the story under the headline:
In Texas, 99.5% of people who died from COVID from February through July 14 weren't vaccinated,
As of the beginning of February very few people had been vaccinated and deaths were running about ten times their current level. A calculation for a period starting then can be expected to greatly overestimate the current ratio of unvaccinated to vaccinated deaths. Another story I came across was for a period starting in December.
What the current ratio is I don't know — possibly no one does. Fauci's claim is about the past month, but an AP news story giving the same figure he did (.8%) added:
The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data.
Among them: Only about 45 states report breakthrough infections, and some are more aggressive than others in looking for such cases. So the data probably understates such infections, CDC officials said.
Reading the stories, the consistent theme is the need for more people to get vaccinated. I agree that it would be a good thing if more people got vaccinated, but not that the truth should be stretched to get them to do it.
I don't have current statistics for the ratio of vaccinated to unvaccinated deaths — probably nobody does, judging by the CDC quote — but I note that, according to a recent news story, 20% of recent infections in the LA area are of fully vaccinated persons. The story includes:
Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the department's director, told the Los Angeles Times that if you get COVID-19 after vaccination, "your chances of both ending up in the hospital, ending up in an ICU, ending up intubated are much less than the chances of that happening if you're somebody who is unvaccinated."
According to the published information on vaccine effectiveness, however, protection against hospitalization is about 94%, about the same figure I have seen for protection against infection. I do not know what the figures are for probability of dying. That's a sufficiently rare event so that we probably don't have good data on it from the trials.