In February of this year, someone asked Sarah Caul (then of the ONS) on X why the all-cause mortality rate for between 21 days and 6 months after the 2nd dose of covid vaccine was so much higher than in the unvaccinated:
The reply (I didn’t see this at the time) is enlightening:
If you have a new pathogen1 which is driving excess deaths, if the things that protects you from the new pathogen doesn’t protect you generally (from all causes of illness / death), it’s useless at best, and harmful at worst.
Someone asked her to clarify what she meant, but the reply seems nonsensical and unrelated to the question she raised by her response:
Phil wasn’t asking about “stopping all death ever”. He was specifically querying why Sarah Caul wrote something which suggested that “off-target” effects didn’t matter as long as the product protected against covid, something she didn’t respond to at all.
So we are left wondering exactly what she did mean.
The entirety of the response to “covid” can be characterised by an official bureaucratic obsession with “fighting the virus at all costs” while ignoring wider harms caused by policy; I therefore find it perfectly believable that - as a representative of the ONS - her initial response reflected this ideology.
H/t to @prwright55 (Pete Wright) on X for this spot.
So the story goes.
This level of ignorant ineptitude is what you get for the price of an MBE nowadays.
I think it’s best if statisticians evaluate what an intervention does, not how well it does what they’ve AssUMed it will do.
That way, for example, if it wasn’t a vaccine (& it’s irrelevant since there was no pandemic or public health emergency) but a material designed to injure, kill and reduce fertility in survivors, they’d detect that.