0.3% of NSW Covid hospitalisations are unvaccinated

But get boosted to save our healthcare system!

Only 10/3402 (0.3%) of NSW Covid hospitalisations in the past 6 weeks were unvaccinated.

In the past 2 weeks, only 1 unvaccinated person was hospitalised with Covid (0.08%) out of total 1, 303 hospitalisations.

If you are following government health advice or any mainstream news outlet in Australia, this should come as a great surprise.

Just yesterday, the Australian Medical Association vice president Dr Chris Moy urged Australians to, “have as many of the Covid vaccines as you are eligible for,” in a bid to combat the strain of surging BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants on our healthcare system. Several days prior, ATAGI greenlit a second Covid-19 vaccine booster for adults 30-64 (it was already available for 65+) in order to, “help reduce severe disease from the emerging surge of Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariant infections, and to reduce the burden on Australian hospitals and the healthcare system in coming months.” In a characteristically bold display of overreach, WA premier Mark McGowan yesterday encouraged everyone over the age of 30 go out and get the 4th jab, even though ATAGI makes no such blanket recommendation for this age group.

And yet, for all the science, health advice, and political pressuring, NSW data seem to be telling the alt-narrative.

Last week I posed the question: Is NSW starting to show negative efficacy for Covid vaccines?

Is NSW starting to show negative efficacy for Covid vaccines?

Since then, a most helpful reader sent this much more comprehensive data set my way, and with the addition of a new week of data (epidemiological week 26), NSW is looking rough. Credit to @LCHF_Matt (Twitter) for pulling this set together, which displays epidemiological weeks 21-26 and shows data in raw and per 100k formats.

First take: that’s a lot of 4+ dosed people in hospital. And the general trend indicates that the rate of 4+ dosed hospitalisations is increasing.

With the extra data provided in this set, I was able to adjust my graphs from last week to compare hospitalisations against entire population vaccination status, and add a 4+ dose column. Adding in week 26, hospitalisations compared to vaccination status is looking like this:

We can see that the 0 dose group takes up next to no hospital beds (0.3%) despite making up 13.2% of the total NSW population. The 3 dose group looks bad, but 4+ doses is where any supposed benefit disappears entirely, accounting for 14.1% of hospitalisations but only 9.5% of the total population.

It would be silly to look at whole population numbers without taking age into account. Severe Covid outcomes correlate with old age, which we see in the below graph showing NSW Covid hospitalisations by age group over weeks 21-26. In the past 6 weeks in NSW, someone aged 90+ was 38 times more likely to end up in hospital with Covid than someone in their 20s.

While the 0 dose group includes all children under 5 and likely a proportion of healthy, younger adults, the 4+ dose group is more likely to comprise of adults over 65 and the immunocompromised, as ATAGI restricted 4th and 5th doses to these groups (until adjusting their advice at the end of last week). This might go some way to explaining why the 0 dose group is so underrepresented in hospitalisations and the 4+ dose overrepresented, but it cannot cover for the fact that the vaccines are supposed to make up the difference.

Since late January 2022, when health bodies and mainstream media started to back away from the notion that the vaccines prevented transmission due to the obvious fact that they don’t, a new catch-cry sounded from ministerial and health body press releases. Reverberating across news sites, social media, and lunch room chat -

The vaccines prevent severe illness and death. It’s important to get vaccinated to ease the burden on the healthcare system.

Earlier this year, while picnicking at the Swan River in Perth, I overheard a group discussing whether unvaccinated people ought to pay their own healthcare costs, or even be denied a hospital bed as penalty for refusing the Covid vaccines. Social media users declared that mandates were necessary and fair, so as to prevent unvaccinated people from, “clogging up the healthcare system.” NSW health minister Brad Hazzard urged the unvaccinated population to, “give a damn about someone other than yourself,” stating that unvaccinated people were, “six times more likely to end up in hospital and 13 times more likely to end up in ICU."

Giving the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume that everyone really believed what they were saying. ATAGI, health ministers, journalists, picnickers. Let us suppose that they were operating according to the best information they had at the time.

But as the information changes, so too should the advice.

Prevailing health advice took a sharp turn away from get vaccinated to prevent infection and transmission and veered hard towards get vaccinated to ease the burden on the healthcare system when, despite the availability of clinical trial evidence to justify the former statement, real world data consistently and unequivocally showed it to be untrue.

In 6 weeks of NSW data we cannot claim evidence that the statement get vaccinated to ease the burden on the healthcare system is untrue everywhere and all the time, but it does demonstrate that it is untrue in NSW over the past 6 weeks.

Not only does it appear that the vaccines have failed to prevent severe illness in the NSW population over this time, they are inversely correlated with poor outcomes as the doses increase. NSW hospitals are jammed with 3 and 4+ dose recipients. This should pique the interest of journalists all over the country.

As for deaths with Covid, the outcomes for the 3 and 4+ dosed population are similarly poor:

The 3 dose group make up 53.3% of Covid deaths but only 42.9% of the NSW population. The 4+ dose group accounts for 13% of deaths, yet only 9.5% of the NSW population have received 4+ doses. The 0 dose group is also overrepresented by a slim margin: 14% of deaths vs. 13.2% of the total NSW population.

Now, deaths is where the data gets tricksy. Two things to cover here:

1. The notes section (p. 4) of the weekly surveillance reports is illuminating. For example, in week 26, we learn that 52 of the total 116 deaths were aged care residents, and that only 8 of the deaths were attributed to people under the age of 65. 7 of these 8 had comorbidities, which leaves 1 person under the age of 65 who died of Covid and Covid only (sadly, an infant). Of the 8 people under 65 who died, 3 were unvaccinated (including the infant), 4 had received 2 doses and 1 had received 3 doses. The fact that the majority of the younger (under 65) people who died were also vaccinated might suggest that the poor vaccine efficacy we see in the (likely) older 4+ dose group is playing out in younger groups also. It at least bears investigating.
   

2. Dr Ah Khan Syed makes the case that NSW has manipulated their vaccine data to falsely show 0 dose deaths to be higher than they really are.
   

   NSW Health manipulated their vaccine data, and we caught them

   On its face it sounds like a long shot. Surely not in Australia. The government just wouldn’t do that. But, it seems that maybe they would. Dr Syed tracks some strange and shifty sleights of hand by NSW Health in their data reporting. These tricks include inexplicably conflating the 0 dose and Unknown categories between epidemiological weeks 8-20, thus confusing efforts to track hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status. The aforementioned helpful reader has an FOIR in progress which will hopefully shed light on the decision making process behind this. In week 21 the reports return to the original format of separating out the 0 dose group from the Unknown group.
   
   This is where it gets interesting. Dr Syed notes that, with the reintroduction of the 0 dose / Unknown separation, the 0 dose death rate suddenly spikes in relation to hospitalisation rates. Dr Syed’s graph below illustrates the point.

   An anomaly is not proof of data fixing, but taken together with the strange trick of blending 0 dose and Unknown data, and with the NSW government’s apparent disinterest in the fact that their own data do not support their public position at this time, I believe it is within the bounds of reason to be suspicious of NSW Health’s reporting of deaths in the 0 dose group.

Graph via Arkmedic’s Blog, Substack

Is this science? Or is this politics?

In an opinion piece for the Financial Review, former federal deputy chief medical officer Nick Coatsworth notes that, as the Covid environment has changed, so should government and business response adjust to the new conditions. Coatsworth quotes Australia’s foremost infectious disease bioethicist Zeb Jamrozik:

“There are worrying signs that current vaccine policies, rather than being science-based, are being driven by socio-political attitudes that reinforce segregation, stigmatisation and polarisation …”

If our leaders and institutions are committed to following the science, we will see them continue to assess the information as it arises and adjust their policies and rhetoric accordingly. If our leaders are committed to pushing ideological, financial or other agendas, we can expect to see dogma in place of reason, policies based on outdated information, and public health strategies that benefit large corporations at the expense of the people. Play on.

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Postnotes:

• Here is my updated spreadsheet of NSW surveillance data.

  

  Nsw Surveillance Data Wks 21 26

  13KB ∙ XLSX file

  Download

  Download

• One state does not a country make. Being a WA resident, I’m interested in drilling down into WA data to see if NSW trends are reflected. *adds to list of things to do*