Incorrect data fuels confusion on shots, omicron

The claim: “Germany: 96% of Latest Omicron Patients were FULLY Vaccinated — Only 4% Unvaccinated” — conservative news site the Gateway Pundit.

Those claims were made based on an error in a report by the Robert Koch Institute that has since been corrected.

Politifact rating: False.

That calculation was based on incorrect numbers. The institute also cautioned against drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines based on this research as it does not account for the nation’s high rate of vaccination.

Discussion

The Dec. 30 Koch report Gateway Pundit was referring to said it detected 4,020 omicron cases among fully vaccinated people and 186 omicron cases among unvaccinated people. But Koch corrected those numbers on Jan. 5, saying the number of cases among those who were unvaccinated was actually 1,097.

Using these corrected figures and the same mathematical processes that Gateway Pundit used as the basis for its headline, it would seem the percentage of omicron cases among unvaccinated people accounted for 21 percent, not 4 percent as the Gateway Pundit headline suggested.

But, even using those figures, a spokesperson for the Robert Koch Institute cautioned against drawing any sort of conclusion from the statistics about the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

“The effectiveness of the vaccination cannot be calculated from these figures,” spokesperson Susan Glasmacher wrote in an email. “For that, you have to take into account the number of vaccinated people in the population.”

Germany has administered more than 152 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines to its population and reports 71.6 percent of its population is fully vaccinated, including 87 percent of those over 60. Nearly 42 per

cent of those who are vaccinated have also received a booster shot.

If a country’s vaccination rate is high, it is expected that the relative proportion of fully vaccinated people among all COVID-19 patients is also high.

Politifact has tackled similar misleading claims about the rate of COVID-19 infection in the United Kingdom, where vaccination rates are also high, especially in older populations.

Snopes fact checkers said the initial 4 percent claim that we also found in the Gateway Pundit story came from a German journalist who calculated that from the incorrect report and has since tweeted a correction.

The Gateway Pundit story has since been updated with a correction.