Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccinations

With more than 85 million people across the globe now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, suggestions that the jab may be causing death among some populations have quickly spread online, undermining inoculation efforts.

Claims that a number of elderly people died as a result of the jab in Norway, for instance, have been debunked by the country's health officials, who said the deaths were likely to be coincidental.

Vaccines not more dangerous to Israelis than COVID-19

With nearly half of its population fully vaccinated, Israel has fast become a world leader in the effort to inoculate its citizens against COVID-19.

But on social media and misinformation-spreading news websites, claims that the vaccine may be more dangerous than the disease itself have also gained traction.

One such "news" story, sent to Fact Check by a concerned reader, suggests that the Israeli health ministry had warned that the Pfizer vaccine had killed more people than the disease itself.

"New analysis from the Israeli Health Ministry concluded Pfizer's COVID vaccine killed 'about 40 times more (elderly) people than the disease itself would have killed' during a recent five-week vaccination period," reads an article published by Children's Health Defense, a site which has been accused of promoting "pseudo-science".

The story further claims that the Pfizer vaccine led to the death of "260 times more younger people than would have died from the virus".

An investigation by fact checkers at Health Feedback, however, found that data published by the Israeli health ministry "actually points to the vaccine reducing the likelihood of dying from COVID-19, in both the young and the old".

"The data showed that the majority of COVID-19 deaths in vaccinated people occurred in those who had received only one dose," Health Feedback reported.

"This isn't as unexpected as the post claimed, as these people hadn't fully developed immunity and were still as vulnerable to COVID-19 as unvaccinated people."

The findings may not be surprising to those familiar with Children's Health Defense, which was given a low trustworthy rating by Media Bias/Fact Check, a website dedicated to cataloguing media bias and deceptive news practices.

"Overall, we rate the Children's Health Defense a strong conspiracy and quackery level advocacy group that frequently promotes unsupported claims," the website concluded.

In the UK, reports that more than 400 people have died following a COVID-19 jab are missing some crucial context, fact checkers at Reuters and Full Fact have noted.

Under the UK Government's "Yellow Card" scheme, information on suspected side effects and adverse reactions to medicines is collected and monitored by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), including those related to COVID-19 vaccines.

According to the latest Yellow Card report, a total of 508 people have died following a COVID-19 vaccine in the UK. But that doesn't mean the vaccine caused their deaths.

According to the MHRA, the reported adverse events following a COVID-19 vaccine are not always a proven side effect of the jab, and some events "may have happened anyway, regardless of vaccination".

"A high proportion of people vaccinated in the vaccination campaign so far are very elderly, many of whom will also have pre-existing medical conditions," the agency notes in its report.

"Older age and chronic underlying illnesses make it more likely that coincidental adverse events will occur, especially given the millions of people vaccinated."

Full Fact also noted that the MHRA has asked for any suspicions about adverse effects to be reported, "even if the person reporting it is not sure that it was caused by the vaccine".

"This means that many suspected [adverse reactions] reported 'do not have any relation to the vaccine or medicine and it is often coincidental that they both occurred around the same time'," Full Fact said.

In a similar misunderstanding of correlation and causation, a claim that a Japanese woman died of a brain haemorrhage in the days after receiving a Pfizer vaccine has been debunked by AFP Fact Check.

According to the fact checkers, posts spread online showed a portion of a news report on the woman's death, but failed to include the section of the report in which experts clarified that no link had been established between the woman's death and the vaccine.

As pointed out by AFP Fact Check, the missing section of the news report reads: "[A Japanese health official] clarified that the vaccine was not linked to the brain haemorrhage of the senior citizen who died, because this is a common cause of death for people within the 40 to 60 age group."

An official Japanese Government report also "does not implicate Pfizer-BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine in the death", the fact checkers added.

World famous boxer not vaccine victim

When boxing great Marvelous Marvin Hagler died this week, aged 66, rumours swirled that a COVID-19 vaccine had caused his death.

But that wasn't the case, according to Hagler's widow, Kay G Hagler. "I was the only person close to him until the last minute, and I am the only person that know [sic] how things went not even his family know all the details," Ms Hagler wrote on Facebook. "For sure [it] wasn't the vaccine that caused his death".

Did 80% of the crew of Australian warship fall ill after COVID jabs?

A Facebook post claiming 80 per cent of the crew of the HMAS Sydney suffered "severe illness" following COVID-19 vaccinations has been rubbished by the Department of Defence.

The post, published by a Facebook group serving the Australian veteran community, also suggested that eight crew members had been admitted to intensive care after receiving the jab.

In a statement published in response to questions put forward by Fact Check, the Department of Defence confirmed that the crew had voluntarily received the vaccine, and were encouraged to report to medical personnel if they subsequently felt unwell.

"Several members of HMAS Sydney's crew did present to hospital after hours with mild side effects," the department said. "They were assessed in the emergency department before being released — they were not admitted to hospital. A number of other members also reported mild side effect symptoms that did not require medical care. All symptoms experienced were within the broad range of routine side effects associated with receiving any vaccination."

According to the department, the ship had departed for the US on March 11 with a full crew. "No members of the Ship's company failed to deploy as a result of taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

From Washington, D.C.

Soon after signing the latest COVID-19 relief legislation last week, US President Joe Biden made his first prime time TV address to the nation, while fact checkers watched on closely.

Speaking about COVID-19 vaccines, Mr Biden claimed that two months prior, the country "didn't have nearly enough vaccine supply to vaccinate all, or even near all, of the American public" but soon would.

FactCheck.org found this claim to be missing some crucial context.

"While the Biden administration has increased vaccine orders from the companies with authorised vaccines, the Trump administration had contracts in place for plenty of vaccines for all Americans — provided other vaccines gained authorisations," the fact checkers said.

"And Biden's predecessor also had options to increase orders from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, the first two vaccines to get Food and Drug Administration authorisation."

FactCheck.org also noted that Mr Biden's claim to be on track to deliver on his promise to administer 100 million vaccines in his first 100 days in office was helped along by the former administration.

"The US — even before Biden took office — was virtually already on pace to administer that many additional vaccine doses in his first 100 days."

CNN Facts First, meanwhile, found that while Mr Biden's claim that the US had administered more COVID-19 vaccines than any other country was correct, other nations had inoculated a greater proportion of their populations.

"Fourteen countries including Chile, Israel and the United Kingdom have vaccinated more people per capita," the fact checkers noted.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-19/coronacheck-vaccine-misinformation-debunked/13258256

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Mask Mandates Do Not Save Lives

Although some studies have concluded that masks help stop the spread of COVID-19, usually they have failed to replicate real-world situations. A common approach is to evaluate the effectiveness of mask material at stopping the expulsion or intake of the aerosols presumed to be the airborne carriers of the virus. Useful information, perhaps, but at this stage, what we need to know is whether the widespread use of masks is measurably reducing the risk of death from the disease. To continue requiring the use of masks makes sense only if there is compelling data that death rates are lower for people who wear masks than it is for people who do not.

We have no way of measuring whether or how much and how appropriately individuals wear masks, but state mandates that people wear them are predicated on the notion that more people will do so if they are threatened with a fine or punishment. Thus, it makes sense to demand that states with mask mandates have lower COVID-19 death rates than states that don't. If states with mask mandates are not experiencing lower rates than states without them, the citizenry should insist that the burdensome policy of requiring masks be abandoned.

Logic or speculation alone cannot provide a reliable answer to the question of mask effectiveness. Neither can the judgments and proclamations of politicians or even public health experts. What we need is data.

The Data

The Centers for Disease Control maintains a website that reports the total number of people who have died from COVID-19. Updated daily, the table provides the figures for each state and for the country as a whole. The state figures for virus deaths were extracted from this source on or about February 16.

U.S. News and World Report published an article identifying which states have and have not mandated masks. For those states with a mask mandate, the article tells when the mandate was put into effect.

Those three sources provided the raw data for everything that follows. At the end of this article, I will link to a table containing all the data that were extracted from those sources to answer the question of mask effectiveness.

The Study

The question is, "Do states with mask mandates have lower COVID-19 death rates than states with no mandate?" If they do, the enforced wearing of masks may have been a reasonable approach to limiting deaths from COVID-19. Otherwise, the rationale for imposing mask mandates disintegrates. In a similar fashion, states that never imposed a mask mandate can readily justify their behavior only if their COVID-19 death rates do not exceed those of the mask-mandated states.

Only ten states have had no mask mandate of any sort; the other forty imposed mask mandates that required one to be worn at all indoor venues and in all outdoor situations that challenge the six-foot distancing expectation.

Using the data sources above, figures for the total population and the total number of COVID-19 deaths were extracted for each of the fifty states. A COVID-19 death rate was calculated for each state by dividing its number of COVID-19 deaths by its population and then multiplying the result by 10,000. The result was a COVID-19 death rate indicating the number of deaths per 10,000 people. By sorting these individual state rates into two groups — masks mandatory versus masks voluntary — I could calculate the average COVID-19 death rate for each group.

States with a mask mandate: 13.0 deaths per 10,000 population.

States with no mask mandate: 12.6 deaths per 10,000 population.

Since the average COVID-19 death rate is actually lower for the voluntary mask states than it is for the mandated mask states, it is incumbent on advocates for the mask mandate to either reveal the data upon which they arrived at their conclusion or else stop making the claim that masks help keep people safe.

A variant on the theme of mask-mandated safety is the notion that states that adopted a mask mandate early on have lower death rates than the states that did so late. Since the basis of this contention is that a greater length of time under the rule of mask has been an effective way of assuring low death rates, let us compare the performance of the ten earliest mask mandate states to the performance of the ten states that have never required a mask.

The US News & World Report article provided the information on the start dates for mask mandates.

Once again, the notion that masking up keeps us safe receives no support from the data. In fact, the "bottom ten" outperform the "top ten" by a small but noteworthy margin (12.6 deaths per 10,000 versus 13.3 deaths per 10,000). This hints at the possibility that masks actually elevate the death rate. Would anybody care to investigate?

The impotence of mask mandates is particularly sobering since they usually proceed in lockstep with the other mandated actions intended to control the virus: hand-washing, social distancing, and lockdowns. Since all four control tactics are chasing the same goal (stop the spread of the virus), these data revealing the ineffectiveness of masks may suggest that the other three control tactics are less effective than hoped.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/mask_mandates_do_not_save_lives.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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