Covid data will stop being published over concerns it's misrepresented by anti-vaxxers
Published: 17th February
By: Lauren Brownlie
Public Health Scotland will stop publishing data on covid deaths and hospitalisations by vaccination status - over concerns it is misrepresented by anti-vaxx campaigners.
The public health watchdog announced the change in policy in its most recent covid statistical report, saying the frequency and content of the data would be reviewed.
PHS officials said significant concerns about the data being misused deliberately by anti-vaccination campaigners is behind the move.
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The report published on Wednesday will be the last weekly publication to include the data on infection rates among the vaccinated and unvaccinated.
It also includes hospitalisation and death rates, broken down by the number of doses received.
Officials said two issues relating to the unvaccinated population and testing habits meant the data was no longer robust and open for misinterpretation without context.
The population data used for the unvaccinated population is based on GP registration details, meaning it includes people who are registered but may not live in Scotland.
As the vaccinated population grows, this flaw in the data becomes more pronounced due to the true number of unvaccinated people being much lower than the number used.
One PHS official said focusing on vaccine effectiveness rather than the existing ‘very simple statistics’ would result in ‘much more robust’ data for the public.
They said: “The main important point around all of the analysis is we understand whether the vaccines are working against catching it and against getting severe Covid, and that’s where the vaccine effectiveness studies come in which are a completely different methodology.
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"The case rates, hospitalisation rates, the death rates are very simple statistics, whereas for the vaccine effectiveness studies we use modelling, we compare people who have tested negative to those who have tested positive and match them on their underlining co-morbidities.
"It’s a completely different method which is much more robust and that’s what we want people to focus on.”
The data has been promoted on social media by the American right-wing opinion website, The Blaze, and anti-vaxxer American talking head Alex Berenson.
The PHS official told The Scotsman: “What is happening is people are looking at those simple data and trying to make inferences about the vaccination, whether the vaccines work, inappropriately and sometimes wilfully.
"There are so many caveats and they just pull certain figures out that should not be used.
"What we are going to do is do a lot more on the vaccine effectiveness side and try and make people understand how effective the vaccine is.
“For example we know it is 50 per cent effective against getting infected, but that it is much higher effectiveness against hospitalisations and deaths which is the key thing really as that’s what we want to prevent.”
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The following is an excerpt from the National Institute of Health website on the legal requirement for all U.S. medical establishments to disclose all information about any intended treatment. These disclosures are legally required to take place prior to any treatment being applied, along with the patient's thorough understanding of treatments and procedures in question.
Keep in mind that every U.S. medical establishment and the parties therein are well aware of each of these requirements and that these organizations are likely to face severe legal consequences should these human-rights laws be violated.
This brings into question why over the past several years, the existence of these laws has been so ubiquitously ignored by officials and medical professionals from the very top of government down to the corporate world.
Informed ConsentThe right to informed consent is composed of two parts: first, the right to be informed of potential harm to one’s property (one’s body) caused by a hired agent, and second, the right to autonomy. It was not until the 19th century that physicians began to advocate that a patient should be given an adequate amount of information to understand his or her state of health.[5] After landmark decisions by judges in the 20th century, especially in the 1970s with Canterbury v. Spence, Cobb v. Grant, and Wilkinson v. Vesey, in 1981 the American Medical Association recognized for the first time informed consent as "a basic social policy" necessary to preserve patient autonomy even at the expense of a healthcare provider’s desire for beneficence.The roots of informed consent stem from the social contract theorists of the 1600s and 1700s mentioned previously. Under this social construct, patients own their bodies (their “property”). Medical therapies may have a genuine possibility of damaging that property. Thus, patients have the right to decide independently what risks and costs to incur regarding their bodies. The null assumption by physicians for most of the history of Western medicine has been that the patient is interested in whatever plan the medical professional thinks is best. In contrast, the null assumption under the moral philosophy of autonomy is that the physician has no way of knowing what patients want and must enable patients to decide for themselves whenever the patient has the mental capacity to do so. American courts have established that a risk of harm as low as 1% must be explained to the patient before submitting the patient to any therapy if that harm entails death or a life-altering complication, such as paralysis (Canterbury v. Spence).In the United States, the right to informed consent is protected to some degree by legislation at both the state and federal levels. 42 CFR § 482.13 states that the "patient or his or her representative (as allowed under State law) has the right to make informed decisions regarding his or her care. The patient's rights include being informed of his or her health status, being involved in care planning and treatment..." Nearly all states have statutes that provide more detail than the US Congress with respect to the specifics of informed consent rights in their particular jurisdictions. Nevertheless, in large part, because of the vagueness of informed consent rights specified by executive branches of government, the judicial branch of government is usually the branch that enforces informed consent rights as part of tort claims brought by patients against healthcare providers.The following are the required elements for documentation of the informed consent discussion: (1) the nature of the procedure, (2) the risks and benefits and the procedure, (3) reasonable alternatives, (4) risks and benefits of alternatives, and (5) assessment of the patient's understanding of elements 1 through 4.
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