A Talent for Disinformation

Image courtesy ec.europa.eu

This post is an exercise in fact-checking. I'm addressing the claims made (most recently by individuals such as Craig Kelly and Bob Katter) about Covid-19 vaccines and Ivermectin respectively.

These claims have been floated extensively on social media, although in the case of Kelly on Twitter only, as his Facebook account has been suspended because he was using it to peddle misinformation.

Let's start with Bob Katter. Media reports circulating say that he claimed in a speech on Sunday 21st November in Cairns that several of his staff had died or been made severely unwell as a result of Covid vaccine administration. They are based on audio in which he stated that there were "eight or nine people" in his office who "had died or had been badly affected" by the vaccine.

On questioning, his staff insisted that what Mr Katter had said was that there had been "eight or nine cases come into our office" and it was not people "in" his office - obviously a complete misunderstanding. One can assume that the electoral office would have been put out of commission if this had actually happened. I don't know how many people work there, but "eight or nine" sounds more than a little suss....

The actual audio of his speech indicates that he said "into" and not "in", but is sufficiently unclear to allow for both interpretations. Let's allow Bob the charitable interpretation that he meant the eight or nine cases were were constituents in his Federal electorate of Kennedy, which covers 567,377 square kilometres and had an enrolment of 107,644 in 2019.

Now let's assume Bob was indeed referring to Kennedy constituents and that his statement that eight or nine cases of adverse reactions had occurred is correct, (although he didn't furnish any proof), and look at figures for that electorate.

I couldn't find a breakdown of vaccination take-up for Kennedy, but if you average Cairns (85% first dose) and Charters Towers (73% first dose) you come up with a figure of 79%. The only other large population centre in the electorate is Mount Isa, which is pretty much a mine town. There was nothing on-line that I could find about vaccination rates in the Isa, but unless the culture has changed since I lived there in the nineties, you can bet your boots that both the mines and the various government agencies, both indigenous and otherwise, are vigorously pushing vaccinations.

That 79% of 107,644 gives you 85,038 vaccinated. So if Bob is referring to his constituents, that's an adverse reaction rate of 0.015835, or one adverse reaction in about a thousand, on the lower end of what is typical of reactions to most vaccines, as a visit to the Australian Immunisation Handbook website reveals. In the case of the Pertussis vaccination, administered routinely to Australian infants, the incidence of adverse local reactions is approximately 10%. That's about ten times the rate for Covid vaccines. Why isn't Bob Katter getting excited about Pertussis vaccination?

Image courtesy UN ilibrary

Then we look at Craig Kelly. He's made so many bizarre claims about Covid (relating both to treatments and vaccination) that it'd difficult to address them all, but how about this one -

"The vaccines are not sufficiently effective, and they're not sufficiently safe" which you can hear at about 1:30 seconds into an unsolicited video he sent me from a speech he made at a rally in Melbourne last weekend. (This is despite the fact that I have messaged him on a number of occasions requesting that he cease sending unsolicited texts to my phone and removing the number from the UAP database).

Let's look at the first of these two statements - the first one that the vaccines are not effective. (I'm not sure what "sufficiently" means in this context). There are any number of published studies around the issue of vaccine effectiveness, but this one is very recent, and very representative. It reports -

Findings

The highest VE estimates against new cases in >16 year-old individuals, for all outcomes, were reached at the 15-21 day period after the second dose, ranging between 97.7% for deaths and 98.6% for severe/critical disease. VE estimates of the 14-20 day period after the first dose ranged between 54.3% for infection and 77.3% for severe/critical disease.

Interpretation

The *BNT162 vaccine is highly effective in preventing new SARS-CoV-2 cases. Among >80 year-old individuals, high effectiveness develops more slowly. In breakthrough cases, vaccination reduces complications and death.

Kelly has been pushing Ivermectin as a treatment, and demonstrating outrage that it is not prescribed. (Being of a cynical mindset, I do wonder if that concern has anything to do with his patron buying up copious quantities of the drug - but I digress).

Here is just one summary from a recent trial of Ivermectin conducted in June and published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. There are many more studies which came to the same conclusion -

In a retrospective study, a single dose of 200 ug/kg of ivermectin was explored for its effect on patients with severe COVID-19. In congruence with this evidence, no improvement in microbiological and clinical outcomes was found in the ivermectin group compared with the control group.

Similarly, in another randomised, double-blind clinical trial, ivermectin (administered at a dose of 300 ug/kg of body weight per day for 5 days) compared with placebo did not significantly improve the time to resolution of symptoms among adults with mild COVID-19 infection. The evidence is of very low certainty for the effects of ivermectin in reducing mortality, need for hospitalisation, and reduction of time for clinical improvement in COVID-19 infection.

It's obvious, that when it comes to disinformation, both these politicians have talent.

It would be funny, if it wasn't dangerous. It kills people.

And Kelly's and Katter's claims - frankly bullshit...

*Pfizer

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