This commentary is by Scott Gillette of Hancock, who reports he does know how to read between the lines.
VTDigger is at risk of making itself a tool of the state government by reporting “the facts” of Covid-19, as provided by the state, verbatim — as “the facts” are framed statistically to minimize the political damage of the state’s failure to effectively manage the pandemic.
Here are some ways of taking the anodyne numbers the state is feeding the public, and adding context to make them newsworthy:
1: From the beginning of the pandemic — let’s say March 1, 2020, to July 1, 2021, when Gov. Scott abruptly “opened the spigot” completely (a period of roughly 16 months) — Covid killed 255 people in Vermont. In the mere seven months since then, Gov. Scott’s “raging full-on” spigot policy has killed an additional 259 people.
Reporting the news needs to be more than stenography of statistics framed to minimize the effects of the state’s policy preference to favor the bottom line of its business owners over the lives of its citizens.
2: The state reports (and VTDigger dutifully repeats) that 98.8% of Vermonters 12+ years of age are partially or fully vaccinated. If ever there were a statistic more assiduously massaged to make the state look better than it really does, I have trouble imagining it.
Firstly, in this wave of Omicron, partial vaccination doesn’t amount to much. Studies show that full vaccination plus boosters generally mitigate the worst effects of Omicron. Partial vaccination is significantly less effective.
The state should be offering realistic statistics on full vaccination (full meaning the full course of whatever vaccine, plus the recommended booster), and VTDigger should be doing whatever it can to get real, meaningful numbers about how many people are actually vaccinated to a degree that will mitigate the severe effects of the current mutation of the virus. After all, the governor has stated that Covid has become “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That cohort includes the partially vaccinated at this point, but the state is giving us the most rose-colored statistics, instead of the truth.
Second, children ages 5-11 are also eligible for vaccination. The state leaves this portion of the eligible population out of the statistics because it would significantly cut into that rosy 98.8% figure that is designed to lull the populace into thinking we’re not completely failing to manage the pandemic.
If nationally available statistics can reasonably be applied to Vermont, the full vaccination rate for this cohort is about 25%. It seems pretty clear why the state would want to omit them from the top-line figure. While children rarely suffer the worst effects of Covid-19, they spread Omicron as well as adults.
It is understandable why we would want to report rosy vaccine numbers. If the real numbers were known, people might change their behavior. And in a pandemic, the way people change their behavior would tend to harm the bottom line of our business owners.
It is understandable that when the spigot-fully-open policy leads to a major increase in the spread of a potentially deadly virus, and a concomitant doubling of the death rate, despite the vaccine, the state government would want to statistically minimize that fact.
It is understandable that, having let the virus get completely out of control, the state government would want to actually just stop recording cases of it, because each new case is a further embarrassment, which is why (Education Secretary) Dan French is now doing whatever he can to halt testing in schools. It seems when the numbers look bad, the solution is not to change behavior. The solution is to stop recording the numbers.
As such, it would behoove the reader to approach such statistics with skepticism prior to making their personal risk assessments in these degraded times.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Scott Gillette: Damned statistics and Covid-19.
