Coronavirus: Government’s Covid vaccine data ‘providing material for conspiracy theorists’

The UK government is “providing material for conspiracy theorists around the world” by publishing graphs on vaccine efficacy that it knows to be untrue, leading scientists have said.

Statisticians lambasted the Health and Security Agency for its weekly vaccine surveillance report, which erroneously suggests that vaccines make you more likely to contract Covid.

The findings are being used by anti-vaxxers to claim the vaccines are dangerous, but can largely be explained by a statistical anomaly in the calculation of population sizes.

David Spiegelhalter, director of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge, said that continuing to publish in the way they are is highly damaging. “This presentation of statistics is deeply untrustworthy and completely unacceptable,” he said.

Across most age

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