Scotland will no longer release Covid figures, i.e., deaths and hospitalization data, as the government says it is driving vaccine skepticism on social media.
Public Health Scotland (PHS) said that “the case rates, hospitalization rates, the death rates are very simple statistics,” and accused vaccine skeptics online of misinterpreting the data “inappropriately and sometimes willfully.”
“What is happening is people are looking at those simple data and trying to make inferences about the vaccination, whether the vaccines work, inappropriately and sometimes willfully,” a spokesperson for the Special National Health Service Health Board said in a press conference.
There are so many caveats and they just pull certain figures out that should not be used,” they added. Now, the Scottish public health bodies will be doing “a lot more on the vaccine effectiveness side and try[ing to] make people understand how effective the vaccine is.”
The PHS added that it considers “the main important point around all of the analysis is we understand whether the vaccines are working against catching it and against getting severe Covid, and that’s where the vaccine effectiveness studies come in which are a completely different methodology.”
The vaccine effectiveness studies they will be conducting “use modeling, we compare people who have tested negative to those who have tested positive and match them on their underlying comorbidities.”
“It’s a completely different method which is much more robust and that’s what we want people to focus on,” they asserted.
