The AP's unethical claim that 99% of COVID deaths were unvaccinated people

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Welp. Journalistic integrity has been flushed down the toilet like some infectious COVID diarrhea but you all knew that already.

By now you’ve seen the June 24th Associated Press article that declared, "Nearly all COVID deaths in the US are now among unvaccinated." I really wasn't wanting to get into this issue and was hoping someone else would, but it was just as much trouble to look for someone else covering it as it was for me to look at the data.

Spoiler: as you already suspected, the AP's claim about unvaccinated deaths hinges entirely on mislabeling everyone who isn't 14 days past a second dose of vaccine "unvaccinated." One dose of mRNA vaccine? You’re unvaccinated. Dose two of mRNA given 13 days ago? Also unvaccinated.

Now the AP article has launched spinoffs that take it to the next level of absurdity, such as The Texas Tribune’s, “Texas has seen nearly 9,000 COVID-19 deaths since February. All but 43 were unvaccinated people.” And California’s health department announced, “…between January 1 and July 14, cumulative COVID-19 cases have occurred almost exclusively among unvaccinated individuals, at 99%.”

Sweet Baby Jesus. People believe this drivel? Are we going to have to endure these headlines for all 50 states? Texas and California didn’t even offer vaccines to their general population before March 29 and April 15th, respectively, so yeah, no shit Sherlock, pretty much everyone under the age of 65 actually was unvaccinated in January through March, excellent sleuthing. Not to mention, Texas’ average death rate was already below 100 per day by March 29th and California’s daily new case rate was only around 3,000 for the entire state on April 1st. In other words, this was already over before offering the vaccine to the general public, but go ahead with these nonsense headlines.

For three weeks people like Alex Berenson have been referring to the AP headline and asking, "Where's the data?" The two AP reporters, Carla K. Johnson and Mike Stobbe, provided no links, no sources, and discussed none of their methods that led to their “99% of COVID deaths are in the unvaccinated” claim other than calling it “publicly available CDC data.” And boy did that article go viral despite the mystery surrounding it.

For me, this sentence in the original AP article was crux: "The CDC itself has not estimated what percentage of hospitalizations and deaths are in fully vaccinated people, citing limitations in the data." 

Whoa, wait. What? So the CDC never said that 99% of COVID deaths were in the unvaccinated? This is just a Mike-and-Carla-hot-take on some data that the CDC admits doesn’t paint the full picture? I thought it was best for everyone that laypeople were kept away from data? Science is only for scientists.

By my calculations, the only way to make the math come anywhere near the conclusion that dying people are unvaccinated is with the strict application of the CDC's definition of "fully vaccinated" as being 14 days after the second dose, and then calling all the rest of the deaths “unvaccinated”—something the CDC has never done. Did the AP divulge their inappropriate inverse use of this narrow definition? No. That would have required full transparency with a sprinkling of ethics.

There are only two pieces of data that went into the AP’s piece: breakthrough infection COVID deaths in the fully vaccinated and the count of all COVID-related deaths. There are no other data available to the public, especially no data about people who received one dose of vaccine, or anyone who got both doses less than 14 days before dying of COVID. So why did the AP jump to this conclusion about unvaccinated people dying? Because they’re slimy reporters terrorizing the nation, as they have been for the last 16 months.

Mike and Carla pulled the CDC’s “breakthrough” infection data, which likewise depends on the CDC's definition of being “fully vaccinated”: "For the purpose of this surveillance, a vaccine breakthrough infection is defined as the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen in a respiratory specimen collected from a person ≥14 days after they have completed all recommended doses of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-authorized COVID-19 vaccine."

Let’s jump into the numbers. The AP only analyzed the month of May 2021, but on May 1, 2021 the CDC began reporting only all-time number for breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths, not all cases. They don't give a week-by-week or month-by-month play of the data, either. Only an all-time number.

Mike and Carla would have looked up the "all-time" number on May 30th and subtract from that the data from Jan 1-April 30. We can't see the May 30th all-time number anymore because the CDC overwrites it each week and they aren't archiving past weeks. But you can put the all-time breakthrough link into the Wayback Machine and click on the June 7th capture, which gives us the June 1 update for all-time breakthroughs, which is roughly the data up to May 31.

On June 1, the all-time breakthrough death count in the post-14-day fully vaccinated was 535. See here:

Hospitalized or fatal vaccine breakthrough cases reported to CDC 3,016
Female                              | 1,492 | (49%)
People aged ≥65 years  | 2,334 | (77%)
Asymptomatic infections | 502 | (17%)
Hospitalizations*            | 2,854 | (95%)
Deaths†                               | 535 | (18%)

*654 (23%) of 2,854 hospitalizations reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.
†88 (16%) of 535 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19.

Then Mike and Carla would have subtracted out what the CDC designated with the cross mark in the chart as, "88 of 535 fatal cases reported as asymptomatic or not related to covid 19" because why not extend a courtesy to the breakthrough case death count that we did not, and still do not, extend to the total COVID death count? If the New York Times doesn’t write about inconsistent and contradictory applications of definitions, did it even happen at all? Of course not.

So 535 all-time breakthrough deaths, minus the 88 unrelated, is 447 all-time deaths in the fully vaccinated reported as of June 1.

Then, to tease out the May 2021 “vaccinated” death number from the all-time vaccinated deaths, the AP would have subtracted out the known breakthrough data from Jan 1- April 30, 2021, which has been reported by the CDC as 160 deaths in the fully vaccinated.

447 all-time breakthrough deaths, minus 160 Jan-April breakthrough deaths, is 287 breakthrough deaths just for May 2021.

However, the AP story says there were just 150 breakthrough deaths in the vaccinated in May 2021. This is the problem with not waiting long enough for the death counts to firm up— they’re somewhat accurate 2-3 weeks after being first reported, but more accurate 30 days later when all of the death certificates are in. I don’t know for sure where Mike and Carla pulled their data but they ended up with a viral article that understates the May fully vaccinated death count by 91%. And it’s safe to assume that my number of 287 is too low but we’ll never know how much too low it is because the CDC doesn’t update the monthly counts, all publicly available updates get lumped in with the running tally rather than segregated into their respective months.

Not that Mike and Carla are sticklers for details. The correction at the bottom of their article had me in hysterics: “This story was first published on June 24, 2021. It was updated on June 29, 2021, to correct the number of hospital admissions to more than 107,000, not 853,000, and the percentage of hospitalized people who been vaccinated to 1.1%, not 0.1%.”

These clowns overstated hospitalizations by a factor of eight and understated the percentage vaccinated by a factor of ten? Journalism school must have promised them there was no math in this job.

Side note: this is when the story that isn't being reported hit me like a ton of bricks. There was a 79.4% increase in breakthrough deaths in the fully vaccinated in May of 2021 over the previous 4 months combined? 160 breakthrough deaths in January through April but 287 in May alone? Holy cow! If there was that big of a spike in deaths in the fully vaccinated, what was the spike in deaths of those who got one dose or weren't yet 14 days beyond their 2nd dose? Who knows?

Better question: who cares? Not Mike and Carla, that’s for sure.

Moving along, we have 287 as our numerator for breakthrough deaths in the month of May 2021.

Now we have to find the total number of COVID deaths for the month of May. I assumed the AP reporters pulled the death count from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics, which shows 14,450 deaths involving COVID-19.

The AP article claimed 18,000 COVID deaths in May. I don't know where they got their data because they went overboard by 3,550 deaths when that’s not the direction the updated CDC data goes in, ever. It only goes higher, not lower, over time.

Mike and Carla claimed they used CDC data, but I'm giving you data from the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics and it's nowhere near 18,000 deaths. Anyway.

So now we have 287 fully vaccinated deaths in May 2021 divided by 14,450 all COVID related deaths for May 2021.

And, voila! Only 1.99% of all COVID-related deaths in the month of May were "fully vaccinated" and therefore everyone else was “unvaccinated” because there is no room for nuance in a pandemic, everybody knows that. This 1.99% number is almost 2.5x higher than the AP's claim that only 0.8% of May's COVID deaths were in the vaccinated, but it's close, and shows their likely methods, or something similar, since Mike and Carla never revealed their sources and they’ve already shown themselves to not really be “numbers people” in the first place.

The AP’s biggest crime was in failing to inform their readers that they have absolutely no idea how many of the 14,450 COVID-related deaths in May received one vaccine, or both vaccines but the patient wasn't 14 days out from the 2nd dose. The CDC has never referred to people who have received any doses of COVID vaccine as "unvaccinated" but we’re obviously seeing a new twist on the word, much like how the pejorative “anti-vaxxer” now means anyone who doesn’t support vaccine mandates.  

If May saw a nearly-80% increase in COVID deaths in the fully vaccinated over the previous four months combined, the AP ought to be investigating what the death increase was in people vaccinated, but not yet "fully" vaccinated. My hunch is they made up most of the remaining 98%.

The AP reporters are here: 

https://twitter.com/CarlaKJohnson
https://twitter.com/MikeStobbe

LQ