Bloomberg Serves Up Clickbait to Antivaxxers With Headline That Wildly Exaggerates Covid Risk to Vaccinated Brits

Sarah RumpfSep 13th, 2021, 5:15 pm
 
Vaccine Nurse Needle

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Clickbait headlines are a reality of the traffic-driven nature of the online media environment, but mainstream media outlets usually try to avoid posting headlines that aren’t at least somewhat supported by the text of the article behind the link.

They usually try.

On Monday, Bloomberg completely flopped in their editorial due diligence, publishing an article that not only annihilated the basic premise of its headline within the first few lines, but also needlessly encouraged the dangerous anti-vaccine rhetoric being peddled by conspiracy theorists.

The headline, “Covid Kills 640 Fully Vaccinated People in England in First Half,” was at the top of an article that was a mere four paragraphs long. The headline’s premise was annihilated by the end of the second paragraph:

At least 640 vaccinated English people died of coronavirus in the first half of the year.

That’s 1.2% of the total 51,281 Covid-19 deaths in England between Jan. 2 and July 2 recorded by the Office for National Statistics. Some of those who’d been vaccinated received a jab after they were infected.

To be clear, the health authorities in both the United Kingdom and the United States define “fully vaccinated” as those people who have received the complete dose of an approved Covid-19 vaccine (two shots for the Pfizer, Moderna, and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines; one shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine) and a certain amount of time has passed, usually about two weeks.

In other words, the final sentence of the second paragraph (“Some of those who’d been vaccinated received a jab after they were infected.”) makes it clear that a number of the allegedly “fully vaccinated English people” were in fact not vaccinated before they caught the virus.

The vaccines approved for use in the US and UK use either mRNA or or shells of adenovirus cells containing SARS-CoV-2 proteins to trigger an immune response that can then combat — or at least reduce the severity of — a future Covid-19 infection. They were not designed to treat a person who is already infected with Covid-19.

It’s wildly misleading to count people who got the jab after they were infected when reporting how many vaccinated people have died from Covid. And even with this incorrect calculation, that was still just a little more than one percent of all deaths in England from Covid during the first half of the year.

The author of the piece, Lizzy Burden, primarily covers Brexit and other economic issues affecting Britain and the EU, based on a review of the archive of her recent Bloomberg articles. To be fair, the error in defining “fully vaccinated” as “includ[ing] people who had been infected before they were vaccinated” also appears in the report on the British government’s Office of National Statistics website. The ONS did, however, correctly clarify “breakthrough deaths” in a way that reflects the more officially accepted definition of “fully vaccinated” as two weeks after the last dose:

“Breakthrough cases” are where infection has occurred in someone who is fully vaccinated, whereas we define a “breakthrough death” as a death involving COVID-19 that occurred in someone who had received both vaccine doses and had a first positive PCR test at least 14 days after the second vaccination dose; in total, there were 256 breakthrough deaths between 2 January and 2 July 2021.

That makes the headline even more misleading. Properly counting who was actually “fully vaccinated” means that group comprises only 0.5% of the Covid-19 deaths in England.

This kind of situation is precisely the reason editors exist. Besides correcting typos, editors are responsible for making sure that headlines don’t write a check the article can’t cash, and that writers don’t make assumptions and claims not backed up by the factual reality.

A major media outlet with Bloomberg’s resources and staff should have had at least one editor who could have taken a minute to read Burden’s four short paragraphs and another minute or two to click the link and make sure the government report actually backed up her article’s claims.

The majority of Covid-19 deaths in both the US and UK are now happening among the unvaccinated, despite vaccines being free and readily available. One of the common claims made by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists is to falsely say that the vaccines don’t work, and therefore aren’t worth the risk of any complications (which the anti-vaxxers also invariably falsely exaggerate).

It was horrifically irresponsible for Bloomberg to publish an article with such a misleading headline and give encouragement to the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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Sarah Rumpf - Contributing Editor

Sarah Rumpf joined Mediaite in 2020 and is a Contributing Editor focusing on politics, law, and the media. A native Floridian, Sarah attended the University of Florida, graduating with a double major in Political Science and German, and earned her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from the UF College of Law. Sarah's writing has been featured at National Review, The Daily Beast, Reason, Law&Crime, Independent Journal Review, Texas Monthly, The Capitolist, Breitbart Texas, Townhall, RedState, The Orlando Sentinel, and the Austin-American Statesman, and her political commentary has led to appearances on television, radio, and podcast programs across the globe. Follow Sarah on Threads, Twitter, and Bluesky.