How to lie with statistics and keep the grants rolling in: more Australian COVID vaccine data whitewashing
My attention was drawn by a good friend in Australia today to this pre-print article by the NCIRS, who are a major contributor to the NSW COVID vaccine surveillance reports (although their presence has become less obvious than it was in this November report espousing the “real world effectiveness” of the COVID vaccines conveniently just before the “boosters” were to be rolled out).
The group is the exact same group that published the November surveillance report and is led by Professor Kristine Macartney, who famously received $65m in government grants around the time that COVID-19 was gearing up. Here she is in one of her media pictures and in “Formula 1” style I thought it was appropriate to add a selection (not all) of her sponsors and affiliations.
So to the paper itself - published as a preprint in Lancet preprints. And yes, that is the same Lancet of #Lancetgate fame who published the totally fake Surgisphere hydroxychloroquine paper. But that’s for another day. Here’s the headline and the authors:
I’ll just point out here that Michelle Cretikos is the collating author of the COVID-19 surveillance reports, although she only let that slip in one report (26th Feb 2022) so you can see how the quasi-nepotism works. It’s a close knit family between the NCIRS, the NSW government and NSW health.
And of course the verdict is clear (and predictable) - the third dose vaccine is the bomb! It works! Hallelujah (or whatever your equivalent is)!
But wait up just one minute. First of all, the “significantly reduced” is a really really specific claim. We’ll come to that in a minute. Let’s first look at the other two claims here
(1) “All authors have no conflicts of interest to declare”.
REALLY? You got $65m in government grants1 running a study that HAS to portray government policy (with mandates that likely resulted in thousands of deaths) in a good light or your grants will pulled and you don’t have a conflict of interest? Are you kidding?
(2) “ethics approval was not required”
REALLY? We have to get ethics approval these days to record a fart. How on earth do you think you can interrogate the Australian Immunisation Register - which has legislation protecting it like Fort Knox - without ethics approval? What, because you’re the Ministry of Health (aka Ministry of Truth) “chosen people”? Well here’s a reminder that it’s a criminal offence to obtain information from the register on a whim.
OK now we have that out of the way (yes you can file a complaint but who is going to act on it - NSW health? The federal ministry? The NCIRS?) we can look at the actual data in the paper. And it’s damning indictment of the real-world performance of these vaccines.
Just to get a feel for the study the authors looked at about 2m people around the time of the “January 2022” COVID wave that totally, absolutely wasn’t anything to do with the booster rollout in November 2021. Nope. Just to get that out of the way. Of the 2m people about 1.5m had 2 doses and 0.5m had 3 doses. In order to match up the number of days followed up in the study (which was about 6 weeks) they looked at “person-years” which is the number of days of each person in the study multiplied by the number of people, divided by 365. It is a reasonable way to do things and would be how you would compare 100 people exposed in any one day to 1 person exposed over 100 days.
So that’s just the people studied. What about the result of the study? Well, the authors cheated because (just like the Israeli Dagan and Bar-On studies) they compared 3-dose to 2-dose and just ignored the unvaccinated people. So I’m going to reciprocate and just look at the 2-dose people. This is because we were told categorically by the Kristine Macartney’s of the Australian public health world that 2 doses of covid vaccine were so effective that millions of people in NSW had to sacrifice their bodily autonomy at her whim. When did she say this? In the NSW Supreme Court in 2021. This is what she said:
”You can have a population that's spreading the virus through their various behaviours and because of the virus the vaccines are not 100% protective, you will see high rates of the virus being spread. That doesn't mean that you are also not protected against what the vaccines do which is protect against severe outcomes, primarily which is hospitalisation, death. They certainly do reduce the levels of the ‑ spread from one individual to the other, coming back to my point that if you're not infected you can't
spread the virus, so that is transmission. But it's not appropriate to characterise just, you know, the performance of the vaccine based on simple ecological data in such a form.”
Got it? Well “Justice” Beech-Jones did because he decided that the mandates stayed. And the mandates were based on the idea that you should force the population into an intervention if it is for the “greater good” just like that guy with the moustache and greasy hair from the 1930’s whose manifesto literally said this:
But there is a problem with “the common good” philosophy. That is, that “the common good” is usually dictated by whoever is in power. And in this case it would appear to be Kristine Macartney and her cronies in the NSW health politburo. And the reason the “common good over individual good” philosophy never works is because the people in that politburo are not always as smart as they think they are (look up Leysenkoism).
So did it work? Did the vaccines actually reduce the transmission, infection rate and death rate in the community, like the politburo said they would?
No. Not a chance. Let’s look at their own data.
This is actually quite good because they have calculated person-years. So in the interests of fairness we can assume that the infection rate is the same throughout the exposure year and this would mean that people with 2 dose vaccination are 83% likely to be infected in 1 year. Wowzers. And that’s a real problem because now Kristine’s maths doesn’t add up at all. She specifically said - and the “Trusted News (TM)” ABC reported - that the vaccines prevent disease by 95%.
Well that would mean that the probability of getting COVID-19 if you are unvaccinated according to Professor Macartney would be 20 times higher than the vaccinated. So, 1660%. Yes, the implication is that your esteemed professor absolutely believes - and has said so - that the unclean have a probability of infection in 1 year of 1660%.
Yes, it’s ridiculous. But that is where we are. If you don’t agree with Professor Macartney and you work in the NSW health (or federal health) system, with all her links and affiliations, what do you think would happen to you? That is the power of $65m in grants. And that is the power that is a MASSIVE conflict of interest that should have been declared in that preprint. The power to make ridiculous and mathematically impossible claims and never have to answer for them.
But I haven’t finished. Now we know that the claim of efficacy is ludicrous how about the actual performance in this group. How does the death rate compare to the unwashed2? Let’s look at their own data again.
In this cohort, in only 6 weeks, we have 174,471 infections and 4019 hospitalisations or deaths. Overall 4113 hospitalisations and 670 deaths from 175,849 infections. The infections are rampant compared to 2021, now that the population is 95%+ “vaccinated”. But it’s OK to have ten times the number of infections because the risk of deaths is soooooooomuch lower, right?
Wrong.
670 deaths from 175849 infections gives you an IFR of 0.4%. For omicron, the mildest form of COVID-19 yet. What is the death rate in the unvaccinated? Well, you don’t know for Australia because of the shenanigans described in my previous post. However, we do have this data from the UKHSA reports (before they stopped reporting them, because they were too embarrassing for the government) - and it’s probably overestimated but this is all we have.
In this report (tables 11 and 12) in adults only there were 85614 infections in the unvaccinated and 213 deaths giving in overall IFR of 0.25%. Because we do not have reliable equivalent figures for NSW health this is all we can compare against, and the comparison is shocking. The COVID death rate for the 2-3 dose vaccinated in Australia is more than 1.5x that of the unvaccinated in the UKHSA government report. In addition the case rate is far higher following the vaccination rollout and - despite the Macartneyites denials that “it doesn’t matter that the vaccine doesn’t prevent infection when we said it would prevent infection” - we can now see a huge burden of death from COVID overall that should not have happened.
For those of you who prefer this pictorally here is a nice shiny graph showing the death spiral over 2 years of government policy - and remember this is only COVID related deaths3 (the all-cause mortality is a disaster).
As if that wasn’t enough there is a final nail in the coffin for the vaccophiles in this paper. Because the methods that the authors employed were designed - as far as possible - to show the 3-dose vaccine schedule in a good light, they were forced to use the same methods to look at the risk of severe disease in those who were previously infected. These methods relate to age standardisation and are supposedly discussed in the paper, but they aren’t - they’re a black box. Irrespective it appears that they have applied them consistently and the result is this:
Which means that the risk of hospitalisation or death if you have had previous COVID infection (and then received 2 doses of the #safeandeffective) compared to someone who received 2 doses of the #safeandeffective without a previous infection was 0.29% compared to 2.6%, about 10x lower. Essentially that demonstrates - beyond any reasonable doubt that - for those 99.8% of the population that were never at serious risk from omicron - natural infection provides 10x more protection than the #safeandeffective (approved by Pfizer, Macartney and Hazzard) does.
That’s it. Game over. It’s a complete and utter failure and Kristine Macartney can keep going on tours selling snake oil and playing whack-a-mouse with her dissenters. We won’t give up. The health of the nation is at stake.
Legal notice: This article applies to Australian public data and should be considered a public interest disclosure under the federal Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013. The article has been submitted to public and legal entities to afford protection under the act. Those wishing to use this article to attack the author or those who wish to contribute to this discussion should familiarise themselves with the criminal liabilities relevant under the Act.
Ark is a badass!
Watching the court case back in Oct/Nov, something about our friend Prof Kristine Macartney just stunk immediately, her explanations were full of fluff and didn’t pass “the pub test”. Fast forward and now understanding the full COI at play and it makes my blood boil that people have potentially been injured and/or killed and my wife has had to suffer losing her midwifery career for keeping her bodily autonomy. This is an unbelievable crime, how do these people sleep at night? What the hell can we do to overcome this level of evil? Will truth eventually win? Thanks for everything you are doing good Doc 🙏