Earlier this month the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) recommended a fifth dose for Australians. The government immediately accepted the recommendation. In Australia today, Monday 20 February 2023, a 5th dose is available to those, ages 18+, who have not had a booster (or COVID) within 6 months.
Of course, there are no trials or evidence for the benefits or harms of 5th shots.
What caught my attention today was an article in my legacy news feed from the Adelaide Advertiser. I saw the headline:
Fifth Covid-19 vaccine rollout begins as new SAHMRI data shows unvaccinated five times more likely to die
The article turned out to be behind a paywall. In a moment of weakness the data scientist in me couldn’t help it, I clicked to subscribe. At least for one month, so long as I remember to turn off recurring payments.
I thought there could be some new data.
I was duped. There is no data. There is even no publicly available report.
The content of the article basically comes from a South Australian Health press release. It is a sign of the times that legacy media adds no value to these press releases.
Legacy media just parrots what is fed to them.
From the press release:
South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI) analysed 70,450 COVID-19 cases recorded in South Australia between 1 August 2022 and 31 October 2022, and took into account other risk factors, including age. The key findings of the report show:
Vaccination lowers the chance of hospitalisation and the probability of death, with each dose lowering the chance of each outcome further;
South Australians with no vaccination were about eight times more likely to be hospitalised and about five times more likely to die than those with three or four doses; and,
Those with one or two doses of vaccine were about three times more likely to be hospitalised and about two times more likely to die than those with three or four doses;
Older age was confirmed an independent risk factor for death and hospitalisation from COVID-19.
I certainly couldn’t find any evidence of this report being released. It was not on the SAHMRI or SA government sites.
How many COVID deaths were there in SA over this period? SA Health provides no datasets or weekly reports as far as I can tell. There is a web page that updates daily. For example latest data is found here.
You have to capture values from the page and collate it yourself. There is one dataset available for download. This is a table of Local Government Areas (LGA’s) and the number of cases. This is of use to absolutely no-one.
Fortunately, some sites like covidlive.com.au do helpful webscraping. Deaths for SA can be found here. I estimate there were 350 COVID deaths in SA over the period of the analysis.
From NSW data published over the same period the majority of COVID deaths were in 3 and 4 dose people. They were also older people who we expect are most at risk. To work out this 5 times more likely to die, we have to take into account vaccination rates. For SA, at the current time, for ages 16+ 92% have had two doses. The number of unvaccinated people dying will therefore be small. Small numbers mean prone to error. Note I’ll address this in a future post. I have updated original post here as I had a mistake.
There were zero hospitalisations of unvaccinated people some weeks in NSW. There were possibly zero people, with no comorbidities, under age 65, who died from COVID. I say possibly because we had to infer things from the way the data were provided in the reports. We know this means that unvaccinated people dying were likely in aged care and were frail people who were intentionally not given the shots. The TGA was made aware from Norway data that elderly frail people were dying shortly after being injected and were advised to take care with this cohort.
The people dying from COVID will be elderly with a median age that is greater than the median age of death from all causes in Australia.
Clearly SAHMRI is doing some dodgy age adjustment. They say older age was confirmed as an independent risk factor. Really? They confirmed it. Thankyou SAHMRI for letting us know this.
It is also possible that they are taking people with unknown vaccination status and counting them as unvaccinated. We have to question where they got their data.
This rubbish reporting, with no references or detail, is rolled out on the same day that 5th doses are available to encourage people to run out to get these doses. The Australian Health Minister has said the government had 4 million Omicron-specific booster doses available now and that another 10 million were expected to arrive this month.
It makes out as if the unvaccinated are dying when it is actually the elderly frail people, or people with serious comorbidities, whether unvaccinated or not, who are at risk.
There is evidence that compromised immune systems from repeat injections is leading to more infections. These infections will pass through the community to those who are at risk. Some of these people will unfortunately die.
It’s a sad time when investigative journalism has to be done by independent engineers or scientists.
I too tried to get a hold of this "report": rang Caroline Millar (report author) - no answer, rang SAHMRI - couldn't find it, didn't know about it, rang the SAHMRI publicity person - no answer, rang Chris Picton's office - ministerial liaison officer still looking!!! Besides your suspicions, could I also raise the definition of "unvaccinated". SA Health has always been tremendous in counting people who were vaccinated less than 14 days ago as "unvaccinated. I was hoping to check with Caroline Millar if this was what was driving the numbers. Like Adrian Esterman's modelling assumptions, I guess this is not meant to be discovered.
Please read articles linked below. In particular, the FOI related to hospitalisations. I can upload the full FOI for authenticity.. but how do you go from 8% of total hospitalisations being unvaccinated (shortly before SAHMRIs analysis period) to 8x more likely to be hospitalised? Do the math?