Lying with Statistics in New York

Denominator-gate Update

If you want a quick 2 minute update on what we’ve learned about the data coming out of New York - take a listen here. Our good friend Clayton Cobb (@HOLD2LLC) has been doing a masterful job pulling together the details and data behind one of the most egregious stats of the pandemic: how do vaccinated people fare vs unvaccinated.

Yesterday, he published his pièce de résistance pulling together all of the findings (read his article on The Blaze here). To review, lawmakers and health officials have been touting outrageous numbers around this critical issue. President Biden himself offered the core false stat the other day:”

President Biden @POTUS

Here’s the deal: Unvaccinated individuals are 97 times more likely to die compared to those who are boosted. Protect yourself and those around you by getting vaccinated and boosted today.

That “97 times more likely” number is absolutely ridiculous. When you tout a stat of that magnitude if can seriously impact public policy. It’s critical we get this right.

As Clayton summarizes it:

A re-examination of the data without these errors will show that while the COVID-19 vaccines have been effective at reducing hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, their effectiveness has been grossly overstated in America.

and here’s why:

1. New York, like many other states, has been using outdated population numbers. By relying on pre-census 2019 age breakdowns and demographics authorities seriously skew the “denominator” when they calculate the rates of death and hospitalization.

2. Gathering data on vaccination status requires time. If the patient was vaccinated through the healthcare provider system then the match comes back pretty quickly. But, if they were vaccinated elsewhere it can take weeks or months before they verify vaccination status. In the meantime - those nebulous vaccinated people are placed into the UNvaccinated bucket.

Another factor in context is this:

Not only are they [the stats] not true, but they are wildly out of sync with what we know about the efficacy of the vaccine in other countries, such as England, Scotland, and Denmark, where the difference between mortality and hospitalization rates for the unvaccinated and the boosted is in the single digits.

One poignant chart from his article notes the change in verified vaccinated patients at the time of publication versus weeks later when more data is matched:

Before the matching process you can see the MASSIVE array of unvaccinated cases. Wait a few weeks and that number reduces to a THIRD of what was originally provided.

Astounding.

Read the entire article.