After months of off-brand COVID stats, Ontario’s official reporting database has stopped showing cases and hospitalizations based on vaccine status.

The reason given by the province for doing so is to prevent the false impressions that the vaccine isn’t working:

“This data set reported the total number of patients in hospital by vaccination status without taking into consideration the number of people in Ontario who are vaccinated overall. Comparing groups using count data (such as the number of patients) is appropriate when the groups being compared are about the same size (i.e. around mid-2021). However, now that approximately 87% of eligible Ontarians are fully vaccinated (compared to 3% partially vaccinated and 10% unvaccinated) This comparison is no longer appropriate and may be misleading.”

In other words, they’re hiding behind the “base rate fallacy,” which occurs when categories with different population sizes are compared. For example, if there are 10x as many Americans as Canadians, comparing deaths needs to be done per 100,000 people to show a rate rather than the base numbers, wherein American death totals will be higher because of their larger population alone. 

However, this reason for pulling the data appears to be a cop-out and is misleading.

At The Counter Signal, we’ve reported that the rates themselves have become unfavourable and disproportional for the vaccinated categories.

In Ontario, by April 5, those who had not received two doses of the COVID vaccine have a COVID death rate of 0.02 per capita, as did the fully vaccinated. However, those who had received booster shots had a COVID death rate of 0.03 per capita.

Additionally, those with a booster dose were also more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than any other group. Those with booster doses had 22.35 cases per capita, fully vaccinated had 15.47 cases per capita, and partially vaccinated or unvaccinated had 12.75 cases per capita.

As for Canada more broadly, during the week of April 10-17, 222 fully vaccinated individuals died from COVID compared to only one unvaccinated person (among the eligible population). 99% of COVID deaths were in vaccinated persons that week, a higher percentage than the 85-90% of eligible Canadians who’d been fully vaccinated.

That’s beyond base rate fallacy.

Moreover, between May 8 to 22 in Canada, the vaccinated with at least one booster population accounted for 82 per cent of new COVID deaths — despite making up only 48.6 per cent of the population.

The following two weeks were similar.

Between May 22 and June 5, the unvaccinated population in Canada (at 5+ years old) made up 10.7% of the eligible population in Canada yet only accounted for 8% of COVID deaths.

It appears we’ve gone from trusting the science to hiding it.