1. Today’s antivax propaganda comes from a….vaccine manufacturer?

Unfortunately, yes. The manufacturer of the Sputnik V vaccine is tweeting absolutely nonsense statistics in an effort to question the safety record of its competitors.

2. Their unfounded claim is that we are observing higher death rates among Pfizer recipients.

This is rubbish. In our book, we address the way in which people will try to bamboozle you with the unwarranted authority of numbers by throwing lots of stats at you.

3. But statistics (1) are only as good as the methods used to derive them, and (2) are only useful when they allow you to make fair and meaningful comparisons.

The Sputnik V numbers fail spectacularly on both accounts.

4. Here are a few of the things wrong with these figures.

The numbers in the column at left represent country-level averages, unweighted by number of recipients. No one with an iota of quantitative understanding would do this, unless trying to deceive.

5. Taking the straight average of the death rate in Norway, which has vaccinated 1.2 million people, and the US, which has vaccinated 140 million people (not all with Pfizer, in either case), is bizarre.

Why even show these numbers? Because they make Pfizer look bad.

6. In the right column, we are given weighted averages. But these are nonsense as well, because the data are not collected in a way that allow for meaningful comparisons.

Most critically, THESE ARE TOTAL DEATHS, NOT VACCINE ASSOCIATED DEATHS.

7. Given that vaccine-associated deaths would be very low even if there *were* a problem, we would expect any causal differences by vaccine type to be swamped my demographic differences in who is receiving in the vaccine.

8. The countries in question differ in factors including

Age distribution of those vaccinated
COVID incidence and mortality rate
Background mortality rate
Accuracy of vaccine logging and death reporting

9. The age distribution can make a huge difference. If, for example. Pfizer is more often preferentially given to the elderly than is Sputnik, we would expect much higher overall death rates among those vaccinated with Pfizer compared to Sputnik.

10. Similarly, the reporting—both of deaths and of who has been vaccinated—can matter a great deal. How confident are you in the numbers coming out of those countries that have most heavily used Sputnik?

11. One straight-up falsehood on the Sputnik slide is that these numbers are being presented as death *rates*.

Rates involve count per time.

These don't take time into consideration. And that matters a LOT because some vaccines have been available longer than others.

12. In the United States, for example, they compare 10.4 deaths (from all causes!!) per million Pfizer vaccine recipients with 7.5 per million J&J recipients.

Pfizer were approved in December. J&J in February. Pfizer recipients have had a lot more time to die!

13. Another example of the sorts of confounds in Sputnik's propaganda. (I have not independently verified this) https://twitter.com/PalicsekL/status/1386978780460331009

14. All in all, these are absolutely useless numbers, compiled in a transparently inappropriate fashion, and coupled with a message promoting fear around the leading vaccine candidates while making the manufacturer's own vaccine look good.

It's awful propaganda from Sputnik.