Link to GB News: Mark Steyn interviews Jamie Jenkins
Mark Steyn on GB News interviewed Jamie Jenkins, former Head of Health/Employment stats at the Office for National Statistics, about UK HSA efficacy data.
In this interview, Jenkins admits, from the 8:00 mark, that:
…they were deaths within 60 days of a positive Covid test… you could have been punched in a nightclub, sadly died, and you’d be in that table. You could have fallen off a cliff and you’d be in that table, and that’s why I’ve been saying for a while they should stop publishing these deaths within 28 days of a positive test, or 60 days of a positive test because they don’t fully reflect now the Covid figures and the Covid deaths.
This is another explicit admission that categorising anyone as a Covid death if they died within 28 days of a positive Covid test is false IF categorising any death within 60 days of a dose of a Covid gene therapy is not reflective of that death being caused by the Covid gene therapy.
In this case, following Jenkins’ statement, Steyn avoids challenging Jenkins on this obvious point.
Further, earlier in the interview, Jenkins asserts:
What [this table of UK HSA data] is showing is what the vaccine companies themselves have admitted, is that after around 90 days the [INAUDBILE] have starts waning, there is no longer offering you that protection, which is why they’re saying to have another vaccine. Now my view on that is while they offer you some initial protection - if you’re older, if you’re younger the relative risk is much, much lower… what those tables that you’ve just shown there is [sic]indicating exactly what the vaccine companies have been saying themselves [which] is that after 90 days, you need to have another one.
What Steyn absolutely fails to do is to ask “How does this data prove or show that after 90 days you need to have another dose?”
Without such an explanation, Jenkins makes nothing more than an assertion.
There are other issues in this interview’s content. Jenkins admits that total population size in the UK is either unknown or disputed, which is a massive variable that directly affects the statistics. This was flagged by Fenton, Normal, McLachlan, Smalley et al in work that underpins these ongoing efficacy claims. He also admits that the number of unvaccinated people is not accurately known.
Structurally, this interview is fundamentally lacking because Steyn does not have the technical ability or preparation in questions or producer support or, more importantly, the cognisance, to ask “how” or “why” questions of Jenkins that are both simple and fundamental.
Finally, there is no counterbalancing statistician to do this work and make these challenges of Jenkins.
What should we make of the above? Hard to say. GB News is going down a road that it is ill-equipped for. In doing so, it is generating watchable content that likely leaves viewers with little more than ambiguity and at worst, leaves them in the same place as before: largely with the government narrative and some head scratching.
This is not a hard problem to fix. Will it be fixed?
Why not just give significant air time to some mixed experts to present, using tools they wish to bring, their arguments to a lay population. Most of the people they would or could invite are people who teach in University or similar, and therefore would be more than capable of presenting accessible material to a lay audience.