Have the UKHSA accidentally released data that they've been trying to suppress?

Summary: UKHSA appear to have inadvertently released data that appear to show that the vaccines have now substantially increased the risk of covid infection, offer little protection against hospitalisation at the 9 month point and might even increase the risks of death from covid for those aged over 70.

Every week we get a report from the UKHSA on the impact of the vaccines on Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Over the past few months these have shown rather worrying data suggesting that the vaccines might be making people more likely to catch Covid — the number of cases per 100,000 in the vaccinated is higher than in the unvaccinated. What’s more, there’s been a strong trend of worsening performance for the vaccines; in the first report where these data were offered it was only a slight effect and only in the elderly, whereas in most recent reports the number of cases per 100,000 has been significantly higher for all age groups over 18.

This seems like an impossibility — we know that effectiveness of vaccines can wane to the point of needing boosters after a few years, but vaccines don’t generally make infection more likely than in the unvaccinated. But it is by no means impossible — rather, the situation of ‘not having vaccines that make things worse’ comes because of rigorous testing; through proper processes and timescales vaccines that make infection more likely get their development stopped before the get approval for release, thus we only have experience of vaccines that act to reduce risk of infection/disease.

In the UK boosters were offered in autumn 2021, first for the vulnerable groups and, later, for all adults. The boosters likely improve the protection offered by the vaccines at least in the short term, however, UKHSA hasn’t released data for two or three dose separately, instead releasing data for ‘two or more doses’. This has made interpretation of the impact of the vaccines difficult, particularly as their performance wanes.

Until now (possibly).

In the today’s release the numbers given for cases/hospitalisations/deaths were clearly incorrect — for older age groups in particular, there’s no way that covid suddenly went away (eg, for those aged 70-79 there were 63,697 cases in last week’s report, and 6,751 in this week’s). This was soon corrected by the UKHSA in an update, but not before many had downloaded the document…

I believe that the UKHSA mistakenly published the data for two vaccine doses only. To make matters worse, they appear to have applied the population vaccination numbers for ‘two or more doses’ when calculating the rates for infection/hospitalisation/death per 100,000.

Fortunately, we can get fairly accurate figures for the number in the UK that have had two, but not three, doses of the vaccines — thus we can calculate covid infection/hospitalisation/death rates after two doses only from the information given in that first UKHSA release.

I must repeat at this point that this is speculation on my part — the figures in that original UKHSA release do look like they relate to two doses only, but this is by no means certain.

Here’s my calculation of the covid infection/hospitalisation/death rates between late December 2021 and the first week of January 2022, for two doses of vaccine only, along with rates for the unvaccinated for comparison (taken from page 43 of the report):

Note how the rates for infection appear to be much worse in the 2-dose vaccinated than in the unvaccinated, while hospitalisations and death rates appear to be only slightly better for those aged under 70 and pretty-much identical to those aged over 70. I note that those aged over 70 were vaccinated first in the UK, so this might simply be an effect of time since vaccination rather than an effect of age.

The scary bit is the two columns at the right, for the risk of death within 60 days of the positive covid test — the data suggests that while the vaccines offer some limited protection to those under 60 / vaccinated recently, the risk of death appears to be approximately 50% greater in the double-vaccinated, compared with the unvaccinated, for those over 70 / vaccinated first.

I have spoken before about the need to consider deaths up to 60 days after the first positive test, rather than the more commonly used 28 days.

If the UKHSA have released two-dose-only data then it appears that the vaccines substantially increase the risk of infection and that protection against hospitalisation and death wanes to zero after approximately 9 months and there are strong indications that it might even result in a substantial increased risk of death after this point.

The data suggests that those that have been vaccinated need to have the boosters to keep their risk of becoming infected low, have no residual protection after 6-9 months and might even have an increased risk of death after approximately 9 months. Of course, they can simply take their regular booster dose to keep their risk of infection and death lower than that of the unvaccinated — but is that what they understood would be the case when they were originally offered the vaccines? And, of course, there is no guarantee that they won’t be affected by serious vaccine side effects as time progresses and the number of doses increases…

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There is another explanation — it is possible that we’re seeing the same effect that we saw earlier in the year with the first and second doses. That is, that they’re avoiding giving the booster dose to those close to death for reasons other than covid. This would concentrate those individuals into the two dose group, and as that group has relatively few people in it for the older age groups this will give the appearance of increasing death rates in the two-dose-only group. While this effect will have most effect on deaths other than from covid, at least some of those close to death will catch covid and because of their frailty they will be more likely to die with their infection.

Of course, there is a consequence if this is the case — because the boosted population excludes those most likely to die the vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation/death will appear to be much greater than it is in reality.

It is unclear whether these two dose only data show a real increase in risk of death from the vaccines, or if it is actually an artefact due to concentrating those most at risk of death into the two-vaccine-dose group — but, either way, the vaccines are not performing anywhere near as well as we are being told.

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Update:

The UKHSA have now updated the report and the original report with the accidental data release has been removed from the server. The original pages were as follows: