An exclusive news report in The West Australian which worked to convey a sense of extreme alarm to the reader.
The West Australian published an article over the weekend entitled “Low vaccination rates in WA kids are fuelling horrid flu season, adding to ramping crisis in public hospitals”.
In it we learn that abysmal vaccination rates in children are apparently the sole cause driving the worst flu season in years.
We also learn that vaccinations for children in WA are down a “massive 60 per cent on numbers for the same stage of the season in 2020”. 445 kids aged under nine have already been hospitalised with the flu – “a staggering 458 per cent increase”.
We aren’t told what percentage of hospitalised kids were vaccinated, because of course raw data without careful analysis is misleading, but we’re certain every year that the products are very effective. (Of course in analysis years later, we might conclude that they are only moderately effective. It’s all confident guesswork, you see?)
There are calls to get vaccinated by the State Government and the Australian Medical Association, and a tragic story of a Perth toddler Muhammed Saadiq Segaff who reportedly died from the flu in May.
While 10,743 influenza cases were apparently reported to WA Health up till recently (and 39% were children younger than 12), experts believe the circulating strains are no more serious than previous years, but are adamant the surge in cases are a direct result of low vaccination rates, particularly in kids.
We are told WA “has the second lowest vaccination coverage among six month to five–year-olds in the country, with 20.6 per cent.”
One of the cited experts is Assistant Professor Asha Bowen, Head of the Department of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at Perth Children’s Hospital, who says: “The single thing different to pre-pandemic years is the number of younger Australians not getting an influenza vaccine.”
It seems like an open-and-shut case for fans of intermittent correlation equals causation (because you can apparently selectively apply that concept depending on the aims).
One Small Problem
It’s not true. As reported by The West Australian itself back in 2019, in the pre-pandemic years the vaccination rate was lower than this year at the same point:
“More WA children under five have been vaccinated against the flu so far this year — 17.6 per cent — compared with the same time last year — 9.5 per cent.”
Just so we’re clear:
2023 - 20.6%
2019 - 17.6%
2018 - 9.5%
Not only is the vaccination rate higher than 2019 (a notably severe season), this higher vaccination rate is occurring in a season experts state is no more severe than recent years.
(One aside worth mentioning here: the lower vaccination rate in 2018 is a hangover from the significant drop-off in vaccination rates after 2010 in Western Australia, when a flu vaccine caused a notable rise in febrile convulsions and some deaths. This affected WA more than other states due to an aggressive vaccination drive in that state. The vaccine in question was eventually entirely withdrawn from the market).
Another Small Problem
There is not a “single thing” different to pre-pandemic years, and it’s quite astounding that Bowen would make such an obviously wrong statement.
Her peers writing in The Conversation a few months prior are able to articulate additional key differences when they write: “Community immunity will be less than in pre-COVID times. That’s because of fewer influenza infections during COVID restrictions plus lower influenza vaccine uptake in recent years” (my emphasis).
In fact when you review US reporting of their winter flu surge late last year, reporting largely focuses on how lockdowns and reduction in exposure would be expected to fuel a bigger flu season, with hardly any talking about vaccine coverage as a major issue (and it is interesting to note that many US states have much higher childhood vaccination rates than Australia, and still experienced surges in cases).
One example of the US mainstream media analysis comes from “NBC News in Flu, RSV, other viruses surging in young kids, catching doctors 'off guard'“
On top of the reduction in exposure, we must also consider the unknown long-term effects of Covid, and mRNA injections on the immune systems of the population at large.
Facts Don’t Matter
When media and industry are focused on nudging the behaviour of a population, based on a fervent belief in an industry product that varies wildly in efficacy by the industry’s own admissions, facts really don’t matter.
Bowen can wrongly assert both that the childhood vaccination rate is lower this year than in pre-pandemic years, and that this rate is the only thing differing between this year and pre-pandemic years.
In leveraging these incorrect statistics, she also feels completely free to assert that correlation most certainly does equal causation – a curious privilege seemingly reserved only for discussion on industry products, and otherwise strenuously refuted in any other context (as it should be).
Logic Doesn’t Matter
Industry claims on efficacy are the perfect unfalsifiable fallacy. If a flu year is bad even with reasonable vaccination rates, it will always be because the vaccine wasn’t well-matched to the strain. If it’s bad with low vaccination rates, it’s because of insufficient use of product. If it’s a mild season, it will naturally be because of the efficacy of the product.
Hard Data Doesn’t Matter
While every figure even loosely connected to the industry is utterly convinced of the stunning efficacy of these products, we still find ourselves in a situation where long-running studies conclude the data just isn’t that convincing: “Why have three long-running Cochrane Reviews on influenza vaccines been stabilised?
FluBub
In the original article quoting Bowen from The Conversation, entitled “Heard of ‘kindy flu’? There’s no such thing. But kids are at risk this flu season for one simple reason.”, she is joined by Christopher Blyth, who is currently involved in a vaccine trial called FluBub to give babies under 6 months an adult dose of a flu vaccine.
According to a 7 News report “Two-months-old babies to receive flu jab in new Aussie trial”, he hopes to recruit 160 children across WA and South Australia over the next 2 years.
Considering how self-evidently wrong Blythe and Bowen’s analysis is in their Conversation piece, one wonders at what point exactly passionate advocacy for an intervention completely gives way to a fanaticism untethered to reason.
Does injecting 2-month old babies with adult doses of a flu vaccine sound reasonable?