A mouse has just alerted us to
this response (dated 11 Feb 2022) by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to an FOI request asking:
I want to know how many pregnant women end up in ICU each year starting from the year 2015 to dec 2021 and how many resulting in deaths and discharges?
And then second chart or table split into vaccinated and unvaccinated pregnant women that end up in icu resulting in death and discharge?
The response from the ONS is that they do not have this data, but the part that is especially striking is this statement:
We had been raising concerns about the reliability of the ONS analyses on vaccine safety - which rely totally on having accurate data on the vaccine status of all deaths - in the Spring of 2021 when the ONS first start publishing its vaccine surveillance reports on vaccine safety and efficacy. We produced
this article in Sept 2021 showing that the ONS data were clearly inaccurate.
Yet, when we raised these concerns directly with ONS, we were continually assured by them that they had all the relevant data and it was accurate. These assurances continued, despite subsequent additional evidence that their data were not accurate (see here and here, for example). We even produced a report that provided a detailed explanation of why it was likely that so many errors could be made in the data (see especially Section 7). Now it appears that the ONS is admitting that it is, indeed, too hard to get the necessary data.So, it is worth repeating what we said at the end of the abstract in
this paper:
The dataset is therefore corrupted, making any inferences about vaccine efficacy or safety that are reliant on the data, moot. Accordingly, the ONS should publicly withdraw their dataset and call for the retraction of any claims made by others that are based upon it.
Comment: See also: