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CoronaCheck #103
In this week's newsletter, we check in with controversial federal backbencher George Christensen, who took to Facebook to suggest incorrectly that the government was hiding COVID-19 deaths data.
We also check in with his parliamentary colleagues Craig Kelly and Gerard Rennick, who have shared misleading information about a document from vaccine manufacturer Pfizer.
And we again note the deluge of misinformation shrouding the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
No, the government hasn't suddenly started hiding deaths data
Outspoken Nationals MP and vaccine sceptic George Christensen this week raised the spectre of a conspiracy among "power elites and the media" to conceal a sudden rise in deaths among Australians vaccinated against COVID-19.
In a Facebook post on March 8, Mr Christensen argued that the media, which had once "proudly trumpeted (on a daily basis) how many of the unjabbed were dying", had "abruptly" fallen silent when "jabbed deaths started going through the roof".
The post features an image of a chart taken from the website covid19data.com.au, showing the number of COVID-19 deaths in NSW by vaccination status.
The chart ends on January 22, 2022, after a three-week rise in deaths among double-vaccinated people.
"And just like that … they stopped telling us the vax status of COVID deaths," reads a caption added to the image.
But there has been no change to the way COVID-19 death statistics are being reported.
In fact, NSW — which currently accounts for 36 per cent of Australia's COVID-19 deaths — was the only state to ever consistently report deaths by vaccination status.
It continues to release those figures, including for the day of Mr Christensen's post.
Moreover, the website Mr Christensen cited is not run by "powerful elites" but by volunteers, who collate the publicly available data into accessible charts, often through the laborious manual process of parsing documents.
As the website's editor, Juliette O'Brien, told Fact Check, the reason the chart had not been updated since January was largely due to a lack of volunteers and her own work obligations, which meant she had needed to "dial down" her commitment.
Updating the numbers had "been on my list of things to do" she explained, noting that the delay was, in part, because she was considering how to update the visualisations to prevent the data from being intentionally misused.
Importantly, it should be unsurprising that deaths are higher, in absolute terms, among vaccinated people than the unvaccinated.
Fact Check has explained on several occasions that with most of the Australian population now double vaccinated, it stands to reason that vaccinated people would account for a higher percentage of overall deaths.
The rising numbers also need to be viewed in context by taking into account, for example, the number of COVID-19 cases and the waning protection offered by two jabs.
Although Victoria does not publish counts of COVID-19 deaths by vaccination status, in mid-February it released an analysis of its mortality data since the start of 2022.
It found that among Victorians who caught the disease, the risk of dying was far higher among those who were not fully vaccinated — with their risk of death falling by 66 per cent after two jabs, and 88 per cent after three.
As for the gap in national reporting, this problem is well known.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health told Fact Check via email that it was up to the states and territories to provide information relating to deaths and vaccination status, but that the completeness of this data was "not currently sufficient to enable robust reporting at the national level".
However, she said, the department was "working closely with jurisdictions to improve the quality and consistency of vaccination status reporting" to the national surveillance system.
Usual suspects spin Pfizer safety analysis
Federal politicians Craig Kelly and Gerard Rennick are among a number of high-profile social media users to have highlighted a report from COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Pfizer alongside incorrect claims about its findings on vaccine-induced adverse effects.
"Disgusting, nasty🤡🤡who just blindly peddle the PROPAGANDA have blood on their hands," Mr Kelly wrote on Twitter alongside a link to the document.
"Pfizer document lists 1,291 different types of reported adverse events."
Senator Rennick, meanwhile, alluded to the report on Facebook, writing that "the potential side effects have clearly been covered up in light of the post marketing surveillance data that Pfizer has tried to withhold from publication".
Others have suggested that the report reveals that a large number of adverse events and deaths were caused by the Pfizer jab in the first few months of the rollout.
Such claims, however, mischaracterise the document, which was first made public in November 2021 after a group known as Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency sued the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over its refusal to release vaccine-related documents through the country's Freedom of Information Act.
Titled "Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports", it draws on adverse event reports received in a number of countries, including the US and the UK, up to February 28, 2021.
As referenced by Mr Kelly, nine of the 38 pages of the report are dedicated to listing "adverse events of special interest (AESIs)".
According to the report itself, however, the AESIs terms "include events of interest due to their association with severe COVID-19 and events of interest for vaccines in general", with the list incorporating pre-existing lists compiled by a number of different "expert groups and regulatory bodies".
Additionally, a COVID-19 vaccine safety surveillance manual produced by the World Health Organisation defines an AESI as a "preidentified and predefined medically significant event that has the potential to be causally associated with a vaccine product that needs to be carefully monitored and confirmed by further specific studies".
As for claims that the release of the report exposed thousands of adverse events and deaths caused by the vaccine, experts told Fact Check that simply wasn't the case.
Per the Pfizer document: 42,086 case reports containing 158,893 events were included in the analysis, including 1,223 said to be fatal.
But the document, which looked at reports made to February 28, 2021, also makes clear that such reports were made voluntarily and that "an accumulation of adverse event reports does not necessarily indicate that a particular adverse event was caused by the drug".
According to Nicholas Wood, an associate professor and immunisation expert at the University of Sydney, such adverse events could "happen to anyone at any time in their life".
"Just because it's been reported and it sits on a Pfizer database does not necessarily mean the vaccine caused it," he told Fact Check.
Simon Foote, the director of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, added that the report contained "a list of associations, not causations".
"I don't think there is any data in there to be concerned about," he told Fact Check, adding that if the Pfizer vaccine was causing adverse drug reactions it was "doing so at a phenomenally low rate".
"If it was at a high rate, then it would be a concern and the FDA and [Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)] and places like that would be actively investigating it, as they did for the clots with the AstraZeneca vaccine."
The benefits of the Pfizer vaccine "massively" outweighed the possible risks, Professor Foote added.
As AFP Fact Check reported last year, a spokeswoman for Pfizer confirmed that the adverse events and fatalities included in the document came from "unverified" reports, and were among "millions of people vaccinated worldwide" during the reporting period.
Fact checking Josh Frydenberg on the severity of Omicron
Following a wave of coronavirus cases driven by the Omicron variant in December and January, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg recently defended the government's decision to move towards "normalised settings" for financial support related to the pandemic.
"[W]e are always watching to see how the pandemic evolves," Mr Frydenberg told ABC Radio's RN Breakfast program. "But what we do know as well is that the Omicron variant is 75 per cent less severe than the Delta variant and previous variants."
RMIT ABC Fact Check this week found that claim to be oversimplified.
While it was clear from a variety of academic studies that Omicron causes less severe disease than Delta, what was less clear was the magnitude of this reduced severity and the contribution of previous infection or vaccination to clinical outcomes.
Mr Frydenberg's claim was consistent with the findings of two studies that were conducted in South Africa, but these studies did not unpick the relative reductions in severe outcomes due to vaccination, previous infection and reduced virulence. A separate study from the same country estimated the latter to be 25 per cent.
Experts also cautioned that the South African setting for the studies may not be comparable to the Australian setting due to differing age, vaccination and previous infection profiles.
Studies in other countries found a wide range of lower reductions in risk to various clinical endpoints.
Another problem was that Mr Frydenberg's claim implied all variants other than Omicron were as similarly severe as Delta, despite research showing other variants to have differing levels of severity.
As one expert noted, it wasn't possible to compare them all with a single figure.
Experts said a comparison between Omicron and other, non-Delta variants made little sense, when those variants were no longer circulating widely.
From Ukraine
As the war in Ukraine enters its third week, fact checkers around the world are working to debunk the deluge of misinformation which has accompanied the Russian invasion.
In Hong Kong, for example, fact checkers at Annie Lab found that a video purportedly showing moving "corpses" in the background of a live news report from Ukraine was actually filmed at a climate change demonstration in Austria.
Shared on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, the video prompted some users to suggest it was evidence of Ukraine and the Western media "faking" casualties.
According to Annie Lab, however, the climate activists in the video, who are seen lying in body bags, were demonstrating the number of people they predict will die each day as a result of climate change.
Similarly, reporters from the Australian and Serbian bureaus of AFP Fact Check concluded that another video shared alongside claims of "fake" casualties in Ukraine was actually filmed on the set of a 2020 TV show about a pandemic.
Meanwhile, Georgian fact checkers at Myth Detector have debunked claims that Ukraine's borders were "not internationally recognised" and that Ban Ki-moon, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, had confirmed the country remained under Soviet rule in a 2014 statement.
The registration of international borders was not a responsibility of the UN, Myth Detector explained, but rather was reached through a process of negotiation between neighbouring countries.
"Ukraine has border agreements with all its neighbours," the fact checkers noted.
"The border agreement between Russia and Ukraine was signed on January 28th, 2003, and ratified by the Ukrainian side on April 20th, 2004."
Myth Detector could also find no evidence of such a statement being made by Ban Ki-moon regarding Soviet authority, noting instead that the UN General Assembly had "adopted a number of resolutions in support of Ukraine's territorial integrity".
In other news: Did Scott Morrison have 'no authority' to approve or reject the lease of the Port of Darwin?
More than six years after a $506 million deal was clinched to lease the Port of Darwin to a Chinese company with reported links to the People's Liberation Army of China, questions remain as to why the Coalition government did nothing to intervene in the 2015 transaction.
Asked recently about the Darwin port transaction, Prime Minister Scott Morrison claimed: "There was no authority for the federal government to reject, approve anything in relation to the leasing of that asset."
At the same news conference, he said: "[T]he Australian government did not authorise it, did not approve it, did not have the power to approve it."
But as RMIT ABC Fact Check found this week, Mr Morrison's claim is not the full story.
The Foreign Investment Review Board determined in 2015 that it had no authority to examine the Darwin port deal — because it fell under exemption provisions of the Foreign Acquisitions and Takeovers Act 1975 at that time.
However, there was ample opportunity for the Department of Defence and security agencies to raise concerns.
One expert told Fact Check that had Defence and the agencies expressed serious concerns about a potential risk to national security, parliament could have passed legislation specifically dealing with that issue.
Such a move would have required the government to have a "valid reason" for seeking to override the deal — a reason that would withstand a High Court challenge.
In addition to legislative authority, experts said the Commonwealth had always had very broad powers, particularly the informal power to exert political pressure.
Yet the federal government in 2015 did not, apparently, exert any political pressure over the Northern Territory to try to sway its decision.
Edited by Ellen McCutchan and David Campbell, with thanks to Siena O'Kelly
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