After months of challenging her on Twitter and Facebook, my MP has finally responded to me
!
She published a graph showing the UK at the top of a vaccinations-per-million comparison, with a badge reading 'Our World In Data':
Two questions:
1. Why did your Deputy Chief Medical Officer claim efficacy after one dose of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is 89% after one dose, when the peer-reviewed data concluded it is actually 52%?
2. Why have you chopped off the top of the graph, so the three nations with a higher number of doses administered per million people are not included?
This is the data for Europe. Despite your claim, the graph has not been 'chopped' as you suggest.
· Reply · 9 m · Edited
I consider it misleading to publish a graph with a badge reading 'Our World in Data' then only include European countries without specifying as much.
It is also misleading (and potentially dangerous) for your Deputy Chief Medical Officer to provide us with false information around the vaccine. Why did he do that?
if you are a constituent, then please do email me with your concerns and I will respond to your further questions. I do not have the ability to sit on Facebook all day and respond to every question. Thank you.
I'm on a hiding to nothing with it
my area is a Tory stronghold and everyone else on the page seems to strawberry floating love the twat.
It seems she couldn't resist getting a dig in at me for missing that it was only showing European countries (I actually saw Russia was included and didn't realise it was considered part of Europe
) but it is obviously telling that she completely ignored the efficacy question and has now just told me to strawberry float off and contact her in private.
Edit - turns out she does have time:
I am a constituent but surely it is the interest of all of us to understand if there is a material discrepancy in something as important as this, and to then further understand why someone in a position of such authority and trust is providing us with dangerous false information.
I asked you two questions. I am not demanding an immediate reply and I certainly don't expect you to sit on Facebook all day. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect to be able to engage with my MP and/or her team in this way.
First of all, I reject your claim the graph is misleading. It is a graph provided by Our World In Data on the vaccine rollout in Europe. To answer your second question, Public Health England said that during the phase III trial most of the vaccine failures were in the days immediately after the first dose, indicating that the short term protection starts around day 10.6 Looking at the data from day 15 to 21, it calculated that the efficacy against symptomatic covid-19 was around 89% (95% confidence interval 52% to 97%). I note other countries around the world are beginning to follow the UK's approach, including the USA under the incoming Biden administration. Thank you again for your questions.