The mere name of Los Angeles Times is enough to mean Fake News. And that is what they fully lived up to as they lied again in their recent story on a so-called study reported from Israel.
Featured on leftist propaganda platform Yahoo News, the LA Times story cites a study that is at best worthless but with edited interpretation and exclusion of data, it’s made to sound like showing bit of evidence that Pfizer COVID 19 vaccine is effective in reducing risk of COVID infection. The media story says:
Researchers led by Dr. Yoel Angel calculated that people who were fully vaccinated were 97% less likely than their unvaccinated peers to develop an infection with symptoms. Even among those who were only partially vaccinated, the risk of a symptomatic infection was 89% lower.
The statistical game played here is obvious to anyone who can think beyond the media’s ready-made conclusion. Instead of talking about equal number of vaccinated versus unvaccinated people exposed to the infection and then tested for COVID equally, the study divides the vaccinated people into fully vaccinated (having both doses of the Pfizer vaccine) and partially vaccinated (having only dose of the shot). LA Times them excludes the fact that those vaccinated people who had one dose caught the COVID infection in higher number than the unvaccinated people. Here’s the screenshot from the pages of the original study published on the JAMA website.
The table (available as side bar on the JAMA site of the study) shows that 100 vaccinated people who had got one shot of the Pfizer vaccine tested positive for COVID 19 before the second dose or within 7 days after getting the second dose. Here we also see another lie of the scientists and media: refusing to call those who had two doses “fully vaccinated” until 7 days had passed after the second dose. In reality, you get fully vaccinated the day you receive your second dose. The special definition of fully vaccinated to accommodate 7 days is cleverly created to let the infected person’s immune system (infected means infected with the pathogen given via the vaccine) fight off the infection that the first dose started but failed.
In contrast, only 61 people of the unvaccinated group tested positive for COVID 19 while 25 fully vaccinated people tested positive for COVID 19. Thus 125 vaccinated—including fully and partly—tested positive for COVID against 61 unvaccinated ones during the study time.
To deceive people from seeing these these simple and easy numbers, which would expose the myth of vaccine-protection against COVID, the study included twists and tricks of dividing and redividing categories of fully vaccinated, partly vaccinated, symptomatic infections, asymptomatic infections, and others. This remind us of Mark Twain who had famously called statistics one of the 3 kinds of lies.
LA Times not lied by excluding the actual number of partly vaccinated people in the study catching COVID 19 and the total number of vaccinated versus unvaccinated subjects who caught COVID 19, but by also excluding the shortcomings/limitations of the study that the researchers are obliged to include in each study. Readers needs to see the Limitations part of the Discussion section in the study to learn why this is such an unreliable study.
And yes, did LA Times mention that the lead researcher in this study, Dr Angel, has received research grants from Pfizer? Though he has claimed it wasn’t for this work, but it is recorded as part of his Conflict of Interest statement in the study. How much was he paid and for what by Pfizer is not included but we got the point: the person leading the study isn’t an independent researcher and has been paid by the same manufacturer whose product he finds effective in his study. And he’s not the only one. Another researcher in the study Dr Ben-Ami reported receiving consulting fees from Pfizer, Gilead, and Merck.
So much for sold-out science and the for-sale presstitutes!
Verdict: LA Times is a known fake news rag and its story on the study by Dr Angel is lying by design to hide the study’s results that show vaccinated people run a higher risk of infection than the unvaccinated.
Skepticle Score: 10/10
Ernie's Take 