Originally posted on March 17, 2021. Reposted here without edits.
On March 9, 2021, CBC published an article on its website under a rather worrying headline – “New outbreak of COVID-19 in B.C. care home where 82% of residents were already vaccinated”1. At face value, in fact, the headline is downright alarming, since the last bit of news anyone wants to hear now is that the very vaccines upon which the world’s anti-COVID-19 strategy is predicated might not actually work.
What then, pray tell, does the article itself say, and what light does it shed on vaccine efficacy, if any? Let us examine it paragraph by paragraph and see.
Paragraph one – one sentence. There has been an outbreak declared at such-and-such care home in British Columbia. The headline has already told us nearly that much, so let us move on.
Paragraph two – two sentences. Authorities in British Columbia have confirmed that as of February 15, 82% of residents have been vaccinated. This point is worth revisiting below, but for now, we are once again not told anything that isn’t already in the headline.
Paragraph three – one sentence. Authorities also suggest that receiving the vaccine does not fully protect one from the virus and so precautions must remain in place. This is a sensible statement in principle, but again, does not give us any details regarding what had actually happened.
Paragraph four – one sentence. The same official mentioned in the preceding paragraph expostulates why day is day, and night is night, and time is time, and tells us that one can have transmission of the illness even when fully vaccinated, although to be fair, both the course of the disease and the infectiousness of the pathogen seem reduced. Still no further details on what had actually happened are provided.
Paragraph five – three sentences, and found below the second large-format photograph that accompanies the article. It is almost as if someone was counting on more than a few readers not bothering to scroll this far down on their mobile phones. Here, we are finally given two facts regarding the outbreak – that two staff members and 10 residents tested positive at a 221-bed facility, and that “some” of these individuals had received two doses of the vaccine.
Let us stop here. Paragraphs six and seven give the reader no additional facts, and the remainder of the article changes the subject entirely to cover, among other things, the rise of new COVID-19 variants, the lifting of restrictions on religious gatherings, and the establishment of March 11, at least this year, as Canada’s national day of observance for the pandemic.
In essence, the story was done by paragraph five. Moreover, the entire story could well have been paragraph five, plus the quote from the afore-mentioned official. To belabour the point, prior to paragraph five we are treated to, for the most part, one- and two-sentence “paragraphs” either restating the headline or else informing the public that the Earth does, in fact, revolve around the Sun, and not the other way around.
This alone screams of an editor directing a staff writer to wring a full article out of little to no actual information before slapping a click-bait headline on it – more on this below – to justify its existence. This is also why the writer feels compelled to spend three quarters of the piece discoursing on just about everything but farm prices in Argentina, since a click-bait headline does not work very well on a story that is three – or seven – lines long.
But let us return to the facts of the case. Based on the information we are provided, what other questions immediately arise that are not addressed or even mentioned anywhere in the piece?
- We are told that the facility has 221 beds, but nothing regarding its present occupancy. Are there 200 pensioners living at the facility today? 100? 50? We have no idea, and this surely bears no importance whatsoever on giving some context to the 10 infected individuals.
- We are also told that 82% of the residents were vaccinated as of February 15. The story – and the provincial briefing from which the quotes for the piece are sourced – take place three weeks later. Have there been no further vaccinations since that time? Had the vaccination rate reached 100%? 90%? We have no idea, and this clearly bears no relevance to the story.
- Incidentally, when one calls a resident “vaccinated”, does that mean they have received both doses of a vaccine or, alternatively, “at least the first dose”? In fact, how many residents had received both doses of a vaccine as opposed to just the one? We have no idea, and care not to ask.
- Although “some” of the infected – how many? clearly, this is of no importance – have received both doses of a vaccine, nowhere is it indicated in the piece when they had received their second dose. Depending on the manufacturer, it might take two or three weeks for full immunity to kick in after the second dose, which means that if these people were infected, let us suppose, the day after they received their second dose, the fact of their infection tells us nothing regarding full-strength vaccine efficacy.
- Finally, let us return to the 82% magic number. This implies that for every 100 residents, 18 individuals would have zero immunity to the virus. Thus, if there were 150 or 200 residents at this care home when this most recent outbreak commenced, 27 to 36 of them would have had no protection against the disease whatsoever – and yet the total number of infected persons thus far is at 10, of which some, who knows how many, have had the vaccine. Should this not be hailed as a triumph of quarantine measures, that the majority of unprotected residents have, apparently, escaped all harm?
This is not, alas, picking at nits. These are basic, I reiterate, stress and underscore, basic questions the answers to which would have enabled us to judge whether this is a story of import, whether it has any implications for vaccine effectiveness, whether the outbreak is really outside of reasonable expectations given the number of un-vaccinated individuals still living at that facility, and whether the headline, the alarmist, screaming headline, actually matches the facts of the case. If I were – and I have been, in a past life or three – an analyst tasked with preparing not even a report but a one-paragraph note on this case for my superiors, I surely would have been expected to either try and find the answers to these questions, or else sketch them out and suggest that until we do get at least some of the answers, the story isn’t worth wringing any hands over.
None of this is done by the article’s writer. Nor can it, in fact, because if they started, you know, doing their job as a journalist, the piece likely wouldn’t have gone to print, and certainly not with the click-bait headline that, I am sure, made the editor responsible smile contentedly at a job well done. And this isn’t necessarily the fault of the journalist, either – perhaps there really weren’t any answers to these questions readily at hand, and the editor was pushing to get something out by some internal deadline, and something which could get clicks and views, at that. Again, a tell-tale sign here is that the writer felt compelled to lump in any conceivable COVID-19-related piece of information they could find, however irrelevant to the subject at hand, just to pad the article’s length.
This, unfortunately, has been the state of the journalistic profession, and of mainstream media, for a very, very long time, though undoubtedly exacerbated in the more recent past by new media technologies. This also is a perfect, yet relatively politically innocent, illustration of why every story ought to be read past the headline, down to paragraph five, or paragraph nineteen if takes that long2, and read with a critical mind at that.
- Uguen-Csenge, E., “New outbreak of COVID-19 in B.C. care home where 82% of residents were already vaccinated”, CBC, March 9, 2021, retrieved March 12, 2021.[↩]
- To be fair, it is usually a more hallowed publication like the New York Times, and not a government-affiliated broadcaster like the CBC, that waits for double-digit paragraphs before disclosing that the facts of the matter neither match nor affirm the breathless, pearl-clutching headline.[↩]