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Comment by pw201 | Hacker News Reader

> The statistically invalid time-windowing games the public health agencies all played in which people who had taken vaccines were classed as unvaccinated

As I have just replied to the other commenter, the ONS data he appears to object to categorises various "vaccinated" categories starting immediately after vaccination. The regulator's reply to Fenton makes this clear: https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/ed-hum...

I assume this reply is what you refer to when you say that the ONS admit the data cannot be used that way. However, since that reply, the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population. Paul Mainwood graphed the ASMRs here: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1627979309812965381

I see no evidence here that being vaccinated makes you more likely to die, which is what the original thread was about.

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Humpherson simply says that "ONS ... do receive data in [people within two weeks of vaccination], and that the individual would fall into the ‘vaccinated’ category" which is a meaningless tautology, as the entire argument is about the definition of vaccinated used by the public health agencies.

Invalid definitions are a very real and pervasive problem, not only being standard in the public health literature but also standard practice for public health agencies. Fenton has compiled a partial (!) list of papers and studies which do this:

https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-very-best-of-c...

Note that UK HSA and studies using ONS data are shown to use invalid definitions.

> the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population

They say it does, but the UK government doesn't really the true population size. They've admitted this in the past. The 2021 census is unlikely to have solved it given that the civil service doesn't really want to know (if they could actually get full coverage, then they could identify every illegal immigrant). This showed up badly during COVID where more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed at all in certain age groups. They also told people that only a small percentage of the population was unvaccinated, but when the BBC commissioned a poll as part of a programme they were making (on misinformation!) around 25% of respondents said they were unvaccinated, a huge gap.

So the data quality here is of garbage grade in almost every respect, which is a scandal. People who just tune out and decide nothing governments say on the topic can be trusted are well within reasonable bounds.

> which is a meaningless tautology, as the entire argument is about the definition of vaccinated used by the public health agencies.

The ONS mortality stats linked to by kadkadels at the start of the thread contain data related to people who received at least one COVID vaccine (counted from the day they received it, subdivided by time since reception and number of boosters), as well as an unvaccinated category who never did. This is clear to anyone who read the link that kadkadels posted.

Both you and armchairdweller falsely claimed that the unvaccinated category included people who received the vaccine less than N days ago, presumably because you believe that some deaths caused by the vaccine shortly after people receive it are hidden by these stats. But in fact, the vaccinated category starts from the day of vaccination, the unvaccinated tended to die more back when COVID was new, and the ASMR for unvaccinated and vaccinated converged by about the end of 2022, presumably because we've nearly all had COVID at least once so being vaxed now isn't doing a whole lot of good. Both the "vax did more harm than good" crowd and the "we should still be wearing masks" crowd are wrong.

Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers, as we knew pretty early on when their internal chats were leaked. See https://www.logically.ai/articles/hart-files-anti-vaccine-my... and https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1421397013078360064 for example, and my own small part in pointing out that all the astroturfing groups identified by Neil O'Brien MP were hosted on a single IP address (HART almost immediately moved, lol): https://twitter.com/nameandnature/status/1352998804832870402

Though the prime mover, Narice Bernard, seems to have moved on to newer conspiracies involving "climate lockdowns" and "15 minute cities", people who conclude that nothing HART say on COVID topics can trusted are well within reasonable bounds.

To clarify the claims: The main problem with time windowing is in the effectiveness calculations. That claim isn't specific to England or the ONS, it shows up in many studies and countries.

The main problem with UK-specific death statistics is that they (the ONS) don't know the true size of the denominator.

Regardless of the above, due to widespread intellectual corruption in academia and public health, virtually no data on the topic of COVID or COVID vaccines can be taken at face value.

> Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers

Your link says those messages came from a public chat room that literally anyone could sign up for. So Fenton has published things on a website that hosts a chat room where other people said things you disagree with. If that's your best counter to Fenton, and not some issue with his methodologies, then it's safe to assume you concede his points are correct.

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