Information requests to government can be a tricky thing. What are commonly known as Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) on popular media fall under the "Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act" (RTIPPA) in New Brunswick.
The purpose of the act is defined by the Government of New Brunswick as follows:
When looking for public information, the Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (RTIPPA) is intended to be used as a last resort. In most cases, information you are looking for can be obtained by contacting the appropriate public body or by checking out their website, where many reports and other materials are made available. If you are still unable to get the information you are looking for, you can make a request under the provisions of RTIPPA.
The tricky part, however, is very reminiscent of picking a wish from a genie - you will get exactly what you've asked for, to the extent it is legal to provide, and not one piece of information more.
It appears that someone in the Covid-denial camp had submitted an RTIPPA request to the office of Minister Dorothy Shephard. And while I have yet to track down who submitted it, or who first shared it, it is now being used as "proof" that vaccines in New Brunswick "don't work".
Why have they come to this conclusion? Well, let's have a look, and see if we can spot the point at which these individuals got tripped up.
Now, if you're like me, your first thought will be "great, this gives some concrete numbers that, in the past, we've had to extrapolate from case rates reported". This document appears to give concise definitions, and fully expressed data points.
Where have the anti-vaccine readers stumbled, though? They are claiming that these documents show that no unvaccinated individuals have been admitted for hospital, only vaccinated. Thus, they claim, vaccines make you MORE vulnerable to Covid.
But let's ask ourselves two very important questions:
What is the time period for this data set?
When did vaccines become available?
You'll notice that this document covers the period from the very beginning of the pandemic, March 2020, through January 26, 2022 (likely the date the request was received). In New Brunswick, vaccines only started to become available in December of 2020. As we know, we started seeing Covid hospitalizations as early as March 2020, and a handful throughout that year. So, where are those hospitalizations?
There's the rub, as it were - whether intentionally or not, it appears as though this RTIPPA request was made in some way to ask "what were the breakdowns of vaccinated Covid hospitalizations in New Brunswick?" As a result, this report neglects to include the hospitalizations in unvaccinated patients.
So, does this mean that the data here is useless? Absolutely not. It includes most of what we need to be able to fill in that missing gap - when added to archived reporting from the now-derelict GNB Covid Dashboard. What we have, and what we need, are as follows:
What We Have:
Population breakdown by vaccine status used by Public Health (eligible population - 750,726)
Total hospitalizations of vaccinated patients (689)
Hospitalizations and ICU breakdown by vaccine status for those vaccinated
What We Need:
Total hospitalizations for this time period
Using the reporting from the GNB Covid Dashboard, on January 26, 2022, we saw 827 completed hospitalizations (either discharged or died), plus 137 active hospitalizations. That gives a tally of 964 hospitalizations total between March 2020 and January 26, 2022.
Subtracting the vaccinated hospitalization count from the total count gives us 275 unvaccinated hospitalizations. This may seem insignificant, until we consider the first item in our "What We Have" - the eligible population breakdown. From that, we see the unvaccinated population makes up only 7.4% of eligible New Brunswickers considered in this report
. Further, looking at the average ages of people in each of these groups thanks to the Dashboard's breakdown of vaccines by age group, we see a stark difference.
During this time period, the average fully vaccinated individual (2+ doses) was 50 years old. The average unvaccinated eligible person, however, was 18 years old.
To summarize, we can compare the groups as follows:
We see a small, much younger group of unvaccinated New Brunswickers represented in the data, even if absent from the original report. Given the oft-cited claims that Covid is "mild" in those who are "young and healthy", some claim that they are at no risk of hospitalizations.
What we actually see, however, is that they represent an over-sized number of hospitalizations. That 7.4% of younger New Brunswickers account for 28.5% of hospitalizations. When we remember the lessons taught by the Base Rate Fallacy, we can calculate the rates represented by the report:
And so, what was claimed by some to be "proof that vaccines don't work" is, using their own proof, in fact evidence that vaccines are incredibly effective. This data shows that, in New Brunswick, being unvaccinated makes you 7 times more likely to be hospitalized compared with 2 doses, and 12 times more likely compared with a booster dose.
As always, the arguments put forward by those who continually deny the objective reality we face against Covid are nearly always incomplete. When adding back the missing piece or pieces, the evidence provided, more often than not, disproves their own claims.