The Unvaccinated Documentary and Norman Fenton’s response

On the 20th July BBC 2 broadcast a documentary called Unvaccinated. According to the publicity the idea was to try and understand why so many people decided not to get the Covid vaccines and explore what, if anything, would cause them to change their mind and this is how the programme came across. However, the vaccine sceptical community seems to have interpreted it as a documentary arguing the case for Covid vaccines and criticised it heavily on those grounds. I am not sure the programme totally succeeded in its stated objective, but it was clearly not intended as an assessment of the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines. That would be a very different kind of programme.

Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London, has written a sceptical critique of the programme which has gained some visibility in the sceptical community, appearing on the popular Daily Sceptic web site. I believe he makes exactly this error – condemning the programme as presenting a biased case in favour of vaccines (for example, it omits many of the sceptical community’s favourite points) when it was not intended to investigate the case for or against vaccines. It was about the specific motivations and responses of the participants. He also seems to assume the programme has intentions and messages which just aren’t there and sometimes his assumptions are the complete opposite of what the programme says. For example, he accuses the programme of implying the unvaccinated are a tiny, crazy minority when actually it emphasises that it is a very large number of people.

Below are Fenton’s specific points (in purple) and my responses (in black) showing how he has misconceived the programme (I also couldn’t resist responding to some of his claims about the vaccines themselves).

Claim of 4 million UK adults unvaccinated: Despite us alerting the BBC to this error (which led them to change their website description) this claim (i.e. that only 8% of adults were unvaccinated) was right up front. It set the context suggesting that this was only a tiny crazed minority …..

It is well known that is hard to estimate the number of unvaccinated people in the UK because we don’t accurately know the number of people in the UK. So the programme is at fault to the extent that it gives a false certainty to its estimate of 4 million (indeed the press release says 5 million). However, there was absolutely no suggestion that this was only a tiny crazed minority. In fact the 4 million unvaccinated figure was introduced to make the point that a very large number of people are unvaccinated. And it was really only there to make the point that the subject is important.

….Hannah Fry stated that, as part of the programme research, they did a survey of 2,500 people about their views on vaccination and she was surprised to discover that 600 were unvaccinated. If the sample was representative of UK adults (and there was no suggestion it was not) then that means 24% of UK adults are unvaccinated, which is even higher than the figure we estimate, and blows apart the BBC’s ludicrous 8% claim. (UPDATE @NakedEmperorUK points out that the survey was indeed representative of the population and that the actual number never vaccinated was 664 out of 2570 – i.e. 26%. This provides further evidence of what we have claimed for a long time: The ONS is massively underestimating the proportion of unvaccinated.)

I couldn’t actually find any claim by NakedEmperorUK that the survey was representative – but some of his/her material is behind a paywall so maybe it was hidden. In any case 26% is not a credible figure unless it includes children – and even then it is stretching it. We know that about 53 million in the UK have had at least one dose. If 26% of adults are not vaccinated then the 53 million correspond to just 74% of the adult population and therefore the total adult population is 72 million. The ONS estimated the total population including children to be about 67 million in mid-2020. It is a bit hard to workout how many of these are adults (over 16) – but it has to be less than 60 million. It is not credible that the ONS should have underestimated the population by more than 10 million.

Failure to disclose the Pfizer links of the two key experts (Finn and Khalil) on the programme: As feared the programme did not inform either the participants or the viewers of the major conflicts of interest of the key experts. Prof Adam Finn (Bristol University) was the expert chosen to explained what the vaccines were and why they were safe; but he is the leader of the Pfizer Centre of Excellence for Epidemiology of Vaccine-preventable Diseases – set up with an initial £4.6 million investment in May 2021. He even implied he was independent when he said (about the US pharma companies Pfizer and Moderna) that he ‘acted as a buffer between them and the public’. Asma Khalil was the expert chosen to explain why it was important for pregnant women to get the vaccination. But Asma Khalil is the PI of the Pfizer covid vaccination in pregnancy trial. Another expert, psychologist Clarissa Simas has had many Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) grants.

This is paranoia about funding. Academics get funding from all sorts of sources. It doesn’t follow that the funders bias their work. It is not as though they were Pfizer employees. The idea in both cases is that although the centre/project is Pfizer funded, independent academics are chosen to lead/investigate to ensure independence. Should they have declared their Pfizer connections on the programme? This is a TV programme not a scientific paper. Any mention of connections would distract from the main point – why did the participants decide not to get vaccinated? (It might have been a good idea to explain the connections to the participants off screen.)

Failure to disclose background to FullFact.org: The CEO Will Moy was brought in to claim that vaccine hesitancy was all due to online ‘misinformation’. But fullfact have received massive funding by organisations like Google and Facebook to present precisely the biased narrative that all the covid ‘misinformation’ is coming from ‘antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists’ and they have shown no interest in pointing out the far greater volume of misinformation put out by governments, the pharma companies and their supporters. They only ‘fact check’ information that counters the ‘standard narrative’ and avoid checking obvious misinformation claims of vaccine efficacy and safety. For some background on how bad fullfact are see this article.

Fenton failed to provide the link to the article he mentions so we don’t know what article he was referring to. However, Fullfact are explicit about their funding. There are many funders. Facebook (22%) and Google (11%) are the largest, but there is no implication that Facebook and Google are leaning on Fullfact when deciding what is true and what is false. More to the point, vaccines are only a very small part of the what Fullfact covers and it appeared Will Moy was primarily brought into the programme to talk about how much misinformation in general there is on the internet (something that can hardly be disputed). Initially none of his examples were about vaccines, although when asked, he did make it clear that there are many cases of misinformation about the dangers and lack of effectiveness of vaccines. There was no mention of antivaxxers and conspiracy theorists, in fact he made the point that misinformation often came from doctors and legal professionals .

No challenge to the many explicit false claims made: Among the most outrageous and demonstrably false claims that went unchallenged were: 1) Adam Finn claimed that people had stronger immunity from the vaccination than from having been infected; 2) Asma Khalil claimed the vaccination was not only completely safe for pregnant women but actually reduced the risk of miscarriage by 15% (but look at what was in the Pfizer trial).

Finn didn’t actually claim that people had stronger immunity from the vaccination than from having been infected. He said the immunity from vaccination was more consistent which seems extremely plausible as a vaccine dose is standard while a Covid infection is highly variable. I don’t know about the Pfizer trial but there are many studies showing no increased risk of miscarriage for vaccinated women and others showing an increased risk of miscarriage if you get Covid while pregnant. However, what Khalil was talking about was the risk of a still birth if you get Covid while pregnant (Khalil is a bit unclear, possibly due to cutting, but Fry makes this clear with a follow up comment). This risk is reduced by 15% if you have been vaccinated. It is a very specific figure and I doubt the Pfizer trial looked at it.

The jellybeans game: Hannah Fry tried to create the impression that only 1 in 33,000 had a serious adverse reaction by mischievously picking that number as the incidence of myocarditis, which she claims was by the most common serious adverse reaction. Showing what 33,000 jellybeans looked like – only one of which was ‘bad’ – was supposed to show how ‘rare’ adverse reactions to the vaccines were. But the most recent relevant data (from the German government) actually suggest as many as 1 in 300 serious adverse reactions per dose after the vaccine. Assuming independence between doses this means that a triple vaccinated person has an approximate probability of 1 in a 100 of getting a serious adverse reaction and for a person doubled boosted this rises to 1 in 75. And, as somebody on twitter said “what if all the bad jelly beans were in one big batch and all the others weren’t ‘good jelly beans’ – we just didn’t know yet”.

I find it quite extraordinary that a professor in a statistical discipline should write this. First, the German government data was not published until the 20th of July – so if it did provide convincing evidence that the risk of serious adverse reactions was far higher than previously thought, then you can hardly blame the programme for not incorporating it. However, the German data does no such thing. It actually said that according to the German equivalent of the yellow card system about one in 5,000 people report a serious adverse event following vaccination. It is the vaccine sceptic Will Jones who assumed this figure is underreporting by a factor of 10 – thus getting a figure of one in 500. He provides no evidence for this. But I suspect it is based on this 2019 paper from the MHRA. This was based on vaccines in general not Covid (obviously as it was written in 2019). The immense level of publicity and controversy around the Covid vaccination programme means this conclusion cannot be extended to Covid vaccines. In any case, reporting an adverse event does not mean that the adverse event is a reaction to the vaccine. You cannot draw any sound statistical conclusion from a self-reporting system such as yellow card or VAERS and Fenton must know that. The way to do it is to compare rates of serious adverse events following vaccination with the background rate and all such studies give rates in the same order of magnitude as Fry suggested.

Failure to humanize any actual vaccination victims. The programme spoke about actual unvaccinated people dying from covid, but used the bad jelly beans to represent vaccination victims. Why didn’t they mention actual victims like the BBC’s own Lisa Shaw? or Vicky Spit’s husband Zion?

I didn’t see any Covid victims being humanised either. It just wasn’t their approach.

The ludicrous and misleading MMR vaccination anecdote: In response to the 9-page Pfizer report of adverse reactions, Hannah Fry used a bizarre anecdote to downplay its impact. This imagined a Doctor about to give the MMR jab to a child when the phone rings; there is a 50:50 chance he picks up the phone before giving the jab. He picks up the phone and during the call the child has a fit. Saying there was a 50:50 chance the doctor picks up the phone or gives the jab deliberately creates the false impression that there is also a 50:50 chance any adverse reaction after a vaccination is purely coincidental.

Surely the point of this anecdote is to demonstrate how easy it is to ascribe an adverse event to a vaccine simply because it happened shortly afterwards. I saw absolutely no suggestion that the programme was trying to suggest there was a 50:50 chance any adverse reaction after a vaccination is purely coincidental. (In fact I suspect the chances of it being coincidental are a lot higher than 50% – but that would depend on the vaccine, the reaction and how long counts as “shortly afterwards”).

No challenge to the powerful claim that 20 out of 21 ICU patients at St Georges’s hospital in Dec 2021 were unvaccinated: all evidence of national ICU data suggests vaccinated are now disproportionally hospitalized with covid, so this claim was either false/exaggerated or an unbelievable outlier. Much more likely, the ‘unvaccinated’ were defined as ‘not fully boosted’ rather than ‘never vaccinated as was implied.

This is the only point that I sympathised with. I agree it would be interesting to know more about this example which seemed implausible.

Then there are a string of “failures to mention”. As described above, this misses the point of the programme which was not an assessment of the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines. Each point on the list below is highly controversial and would require a much longer programme with a different approach to evaluate them.

No mention of the failure of the vaccination to stop infection or transmission of covid

Failure to mention reported data on adverse reactions

No mention of the true risk of covid based on world wide data:

No mention of the way covid data are by definition fixed to exaggerate cases numbers, hospitalizations, deaths as well as vaccine efficacy and safety.

No mention of lack of long-term safety data:

No mention of all the protocol violations now known in the main Pfizer trial.

No mention of international data showing strong evidence the vaccine is neither effective nor safe.

Finally there is rather crude attempt to suggest that Hannah Fry had a vested interest.

What was Hannah Fry’s involvement in the stat/maths modelling: Near the start of the programme Hannah stated that she had been involved in the stats/math modelling that ‘helped get us out of lockdown’. This was a surprising claim. It’s the first we had heard that such modelling was formally used to get us out of lockdown. If she was involved in such modelling, she was presumably also involved in the modelling that took us INTO lockdown (curiously nobody wants to be associated with that any more given we know it was so wrong with disastrous consequences). What exactly was her involvement in this modelling – are there papers describing it other than this one?

This is just conjecture and innuendo. It is unclear what her involvement was and what difference does it make?