'He is wrong to claim the booster “increases your chances of hospitalisation and death”.
Yet another GB News presenter has made a false claim about Covid vaccines, this time making inaccurate claims about the effectiveness of the booster vaccine.
Presenter Mark Steyn claimed that evidence showed that the booster vaccines were ineffective and that people who have had a Covid-19 booster vaccine are twice as likely to be infected or hospitalised, and three times more likely to die from Covid-19 than people who had two doses or fewer.
His monologue was widely shared on social media and shared by a Conservative blog.
However, the fact-checking website FullFact looked into his claims and found them to be false.
It stated: “Mr Steyn’s figures are broadly accurate based on official data for England published by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), covering the four weeks to 27 March 2022, but he is wrong to claim the booster “increases your chances of hospitalisation and death”.
“As we have written about extensively before, the figures cannot be used to make statements about vaccine effectiveness and have been used many times throughout the pandemic to support vaccine misinformation.
“Mr Steyn argues that both groups (the triple-vaccinated and those who have received fewer than three doses) are roughly equal in size and so it is “relatively easy to weigh the merits of the third shot upon Group A versus Group B”.
“However, this data is expected to overestimate the unvaccinated population meaning the two groups may not be as similar in size as first appears to be the case.
“The UKHSA estimates the number of unvaccinated people by subtracting the number of vaccinated people (which can be accurately counted based on vaccination records) from the total number of people on GP registers through the NIMS system.
“However, these GP records are expected to overestimate the total population of England (and therefore the total number of unvaccinated people), as they include people who are still registered with the NHS despite moving abroad, for example, and may double count people registered with more than one GP.”
The findings from Fullfact also go on to state that the report Steyn uses to base his claims on, itself warns against drawing conclusions based on the raw data. It states: “We present data on COVID-19 cases, hospitalisations and deaths by vaccination status.
“This raw data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness as the data does not take into account inherent biases present such as differences in risk, behaviour and testing in the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.”
The ‘COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report’, published by the UK Health Security Agency last month, found that when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, ‘among 18 to 64 year olds using all COVID-19 cases admitted via emergency care VE (vaccine effectiveness) after a booster peaked at 82.4% and dropped to 53.6% by 15+ weeks after the booster.”
It also found that booster vaccine effectiveness against death from the Omicron variant (currently the dominant variant in the UK) for the over-50s has been estimated as 95% two or more weeks after the booster.
It’s not the first time that a GB News presenter has made incorrect claims about the pandemic. Presenter Dan Wootton once made a false claim about the number of deaths caused by Covid.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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