Covidistan Annals IX: guess what--that AGES study on VE is now in the news, but the way it's presented reeks of misinformation

Remember that cohort study on VE done by Covidistan's CDC-FDA equivalent? I wrote about this in Nov., now it's time for a Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics Edition of Austrian mainstream news outlets

As this (calendar) year draws to a close, I shall resume a more frequent posting stance after a week of somewhat reduced activity. Today, I shall have a few things for you, but let’s just start with something that has come to the fore in recent days.

As I reported over a month ago (on 21 Nov. 2021, to be precise), the Covidistan putschists were mulling mandatory ‘vaccinations’ against Covid-19, and they were ‘selling’ this to the population as something that would at least prevent serious illness, hospitalisation, and death.

These claims were based on a ten-page ‘study’ by the Institute [of] Infectious Disease Epidemiology & Surveillance, a subsidiary of the Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), which attempted to estimate vaccine effectiveness. Based on data from weeks 3-35, this is a cohort study that comes with a lot of reservations, with its most interesting one to be found on p. 8 (all-caps in the original):

AGES currently has no reliable data on the severity of Covid-19, severity of the Covid-19 disease, and no information about hospitalisation or intensive care requirements for Covid-19 patients. Therefore, the efficacy of the vaccines in preventing severe and lethal severe courses and lethal outcome of SARS-CoV2 infection CANNOT be calculated.’

Back then, it would appear that no-one mentioned this LIMITATION, which is understandable if one’s aim is to block anything that might interfere with the aim of maximum vaccination. Still, I mentioned it in my piece as I thought that any such information is of value to determine both the validity of public utterances of Covidistan’s Committee of Public Safety as well as to enable individuals to make informed decisions about their own health and well-being.

Vaccine Efficacy, Covidistan Style

Now, with these preliminaries out of the way, let’s have a look at both ‘vaccine efficacy’ against severe illness, hospitalisation, and death as a media phenomenon in Covidistan as well as its bigger implications, about which you may also read in my follow-up piece on 30 Nov. 2021, section 3 entitled ‘The Gaslighting Continues’.

Here’s Daniela Schmid, one of the authors of said AGES study, as per a brief news item on state media ORF [30 Nov. 2021] (my emphasis):

‘Scientific studies have long since proven the high protection rates of the Covid 19 vaccine. But for the first time in Austria, AGES epidemiologists have now succeeded in proving the vaccine’s effectiveness in preventing severe illness in daily practice.

The Covid-19 vaccine protects about 95 per cent against hospital admission after SARS-CoV-2 infection, said AGES expert Daniela Schmid yesterday evening at an online training session for doctors.’

Now, I’m a fairly simple-minded person, and here’s what I did: I knew about that cohort study a couple of days ago (see my comment above), so I double-checked with the AGES website to enquire whether or not there’s new data. Turns out, there’s no new data available.

Thus, I must assume Ms. Schmid referred to that cohort study, which disproves her words uttered yesterday, 29 Nov. 2021, in said ‘online training session for doctors’.

In my book, I’d call this ‘a lie’.

In the law books, this is called ‘malfeasance’.

Now that you know the facts, let’s look at how Covidistan media spins this now.

Spinning the Truth

As readers of my pieces know, I like to quote from the Vienna-based daily Der Standard, which started out as a left-of-centre, eco-friendly, and adversarial outlet in the 1980s. By the early 2000s, it had become the de facto mainstream ‘in-house’ publication of self-identifying ‘eco-progressives’ and, in US parlance, ‘social justice warriors’. By the time the Green Party entered government in early 2020, its editorial staff was drooling and almost wetting itself over this tremendous achievement of a party whose polling data was always (way) better than its results on election day.—This gives away the reason why I’m so ‘fond’ of quoting them: Der Standard is a helpful proxy for the mainstream Green propaganda, hence it’s de facto ‘official’ role.

That said, here’s what caught my eye yesterday: a new piece about precisely that above-mentioned AGES ‘study’ by Der Standard’s own Klaus Taschwer. Before we dive into the piece, two things to mention: a trained sociologist, Taschwer is the daily’s ‘science and technology’ staff writer and he’s about as deep into mainstream thinking and writing as anyone (if you don’t believe me, check out his Wikipedia profile). Second, I’ve been in touch with him not too long ago in a totally different context: since Der Standard’s coverage of all things Eastern European is, well, lacking substance and context (which is my professional expertise, historically speaking), I offered my assistance—and while Taschwer quickly replied to my enquiry, I never heard from him after I told him what I could contribute. Back to yesterday’s piece.

Entitled ‘How well Vaccination Protects against ICU Admissions’, Taschwer leads his piece with the following statement:

Unfortunately, there is a lack of reliable data for Austria. Still, British data show that unvaccinated people have up to 60 times the risk of needing intensive care.

Accompanied by the above picture, there’s plenty of media spin and agit-prop in the piece, including the above picture (whose caption reads: ‘A Covid-19 patient in an ICU at Queen Alexandra Hospital in…Portsmouth, England. Unvaccinated people are much more likely to need intensive care than vaccinated people’).

Taschwer writes (modifications and emphases mine):

It is the decisive argument in favour of [mandatory] vaccinations against Covid-19: they may not provide too much protection against infection and no sterilising immunity, but they protect very well against severe illness, i.e., against stays in hospitals and ICUs, and ultimately also against deaths. These charateristics keep our healthcare system from overload and helps to avoid further lockdowns, even if the number of infections [‘cases’, as it happens] rises sharply.

Academically speaking, that statement is tantamount to a hypothesis—so let’s check out how the probing and evaluation works out.

Taschwer admits that there is, in fact, ‘an Austrian data chaos’ (which, I submit, isn’t germane to Covidistan) and that Freedom Party Chariman Kickl’s ‘misleading arguments’ are ‘not always easy to counter with hard domestic data’. Why? Well, according to Taschwer, ‘AGES, which should actually provide relevant information, manages to do just that only very inadequately’.

Under the header ‘An embarrassing data gap’, Taschwer—about 1.5 months late to the party—finally mentions that above-referenced AGES cohort study. At least, I concede, the LIMITATION mentioned by the authors is drawn out into the limelight of media attention. Quoting the above statement, Taschwer then follows up on it in the following way (as above, modifications and emphases mine):

This study, which dates from October [2021], confirms a protective effect against symptomatic infections. Still, there are only patchy data from the federal states on the proportions of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals who have to be treated in hospitals and in ICUs with Covid-19 [as the main cause], and these data are subsequently brought up again and again by anti-vaxxers

The rest of the piece consists of Taschwer highlighting the exemplary data coming out of the UK, which provides for further absurdities: Taschwer maintains that ‘even’ UK data is somewhat misleading, because

in the UK, depending on the age group, 80-95% of people have received at least two jabs and the population of vaccinated people is correspondingly much larger.

Good point. How much larger, one might ask. I’m glad you asked, here’s the answer:

Sidenote on that UK data (source here, the above illustration is on p. 46): dear Mr. Taschwer, I know that ‘numbers’ are hard to read—but graphics and illustrations? I mean, they don’t require reading, but how do you infer a ‘protecting effect’ in terms of hospitalisations, ICU admissions, and death from looking at these data?

Yes, there is some bias in these numbers, but it stems, perhaps equally so, from the weird definitions employed to consider when a vaccinated person actually counts as ‘fully vaccinated’. A more reliable guide on the UK data may be found here, courtesy of eugyppius.

Returning to the piece by Taschwer, the ‘kicker’ pro-vaxx argument is afforded its own paragraph entitled ‘Unvaccinated have a 60-fold increased probability of severe illness’:

For example, for the group of 60-69-year-old doubly vaccinated individuals, the average weekly intensive care rate was .6 cases per 100,000 vaccinated persons. By contrast, for the unvaccinated, this seven-day incidence average was 37.3, or more than 60 times higher.

In younger patients, the difference was not quite as marked, but still impressive: unvaccinated people between 30-39 years of age were 10-15 times more likely to need ICU treatment for Covid-19 than doubly vaccinated people of the same age. In general, the average age of unvaccinated Covid-19 patients in ICUs was 49 years, significantly lower than that of vaccinated patients (65 years).

At the bottom of Taschwer’s piece, there’s one more nugget that relates to UK data on vaccine effectiveness against Omicron, which is too hilarious not to share. Admitting that the above-related data ‘refer to the Delta variant’, Taschwer first notes that

it is obvious that Omicron, fortunately, causes less severe disease compared to Delta because the Coronavirus spreads less easily in the lungs, as several independent studies have been able to show. [Here it is meant that Omicron appears to no longer invade the lower parts of the lungs.]

Taschwer then concludes his piece in the following way (my emphasis):

British authorities currently assume that Omicron should lead to fewer hospitalisations than Delta. The range of variation in these estimates is still relatively high, however, ranging from 15-80% reduction in the risk of hospitalisation.

Taschwer was referring to a recent Situation Update by the UK SAGE group, dated 24 Dec. 2021, which can be found here. The relevant section reads, in its entirety (my emphasis):

Multiple analyses suggest that it is likely that the intrinsic severity of Omicron is lower than that of Delta (medium confidence). There is also a decrease in the realised severity. Recent studies focus primarily on likelihood of hospitalisation although this is only one measure of severity. There remains a high degree of uncertainty as to the extent of the difference. Estimates in those infected to date range from a 15% to an 80% reduction in the risk of hospitalisation. The extent of the difference will be an important determinant of the scale of the upcoming wave of hospitalisations.

Why Taschwer won’t quote this as-is, I don’t know. I’d call this media malpractice, deliberate obfuscation, and lack of integrity—and here’s why:

In its main findings, the authors of the AGES study highlight (quotes from the English summary on pp. 9-10, i.e., this isn’t my translation; lightly edited for clarity and concision):

We present nationwide age-specific estimates of the effectiveness of the two mRNA vaccines (BNT162b2, mRNA-1273, combined), the AstraZeneca and the J&J vaccines against Sars-CoV-2 infection and symptomatic infection. In addition, we estimated [vaccine efficacy] against the Alpha (weeks 16-22) and Delta (weeks 27-35) variants…

We calculated the ratio of the incidence rates (IR) per 100.000 person-days at risk for the fully vaccinated compared to the unvaccinated group using negative binomial regression models, and the VE estimates against three outcomes, infection total (including asymptomatic and symptomatic infection, combined), symptomatic and asymptomatic infection, according to the formula VE = (1 – ratio of IR) × 100. We estimated unadjusted VE and the VE, adjusted for age (18-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-75, 75+ years), sex, province of residence and calendar week, stratified by age-groups (18-39, 40-59 and ≥ 60 years) and vaccine groups (mRNA-vaccines, AZD1222-vaccine, J&J-vaccine).

I’ll spare you the VE estimates, because they’re all a thing of the past and probably won’t apply 4-6 months after the second jab anymore; furthermore, ‘booster jabs’ are working fine to further distort the data, hence, let’s look at the study’s limitations (pp. 10-11, again my emphases):

Unvaccinated individuals are obliged to be tested for several occasions (e.g. entry tests). Therefore, unvaccinated individuals, compared to vaccinated, are more likely to be detected as a case, which will overestimate the VE for all three vaccine-groups. Vaccinee-cases may be more likely to report symptoms; this will result in an underestimation of the VE, affecting also all three vaccine-types. In addition, a healthy vaccinee effect cannot be ruled out in our study. Vaccinees are less likely to adhere to non-pharmaceutical interventions (more risky behaviour) and are, therefore, more likely to be exposed to the virus than non-vaccinees. J&J vaccinees may be even more likely to practice risky behaviour than mRNA- and AZD1222-vaccinees or are more likely to seek medical care than mRNA-, and AstraZeneca-Vaccinees. This may contribute also to the low VE estimates found for the J&J vaccine. A possible effect of waning immunity on the VE of the J&J vaccine is rather unlikely, as the J&J vaccine up-take has been started in Austria beginning in May.

There’s so much BS in this paragraph alone, but for what it’s worth: dear Mr. Taschwer, don’t you think that your piece should have mentioned any of these issues, such as,

• the lumping together of symptomatic and asymptomatic ‘cases’

• the over-testing madness affecting particularly ‘the unvaccinated’ that ‘overestimates VE’

• the blunt, if probably unintended, admission that ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions’ may not work (doh)

• the whole issue of ‘waning immunity’ (sic) from the Covid-19 jabs

The listing could go on, but I think it’s fair to call out Taschwer as a misinformation peddler. I do think that he’s actually literate, i.e., he could read these above lines the same way you and I do, but for ‘editorial reasons of state’ he refuses to inform his readership.

Shame on him.