Controversial propagandist Prashant Bhushan continues his subtle agenda against Covid-19 vaccines. For several months now, the activist-lawyer had been trying to establish that ‘vaccines don’t work’ or that they are ‘untested’. In such an attempt, today he shared a news report hinting that people are dying of Covid-19 even after taking vaccines.
The report that he shared on Twitter is on Uttarakhand cops testing positive for Coronavirus, which was published on 3rd June on The Indian Express. The report stated that more than 2000 policemen in the state had tested positive, and 90% of them were vaccinated. Among them, 5 had died, the report said. With sharing this information, Prashant Bhushan ended his tweet with the expression ‘Hmmm’.
More than 2K Uttarakhand cops test positive, 90% of them got both doses.
— Prashant Bhushan (@pbhushan1) June 5, 2021
The data, shared on Tuesday,says 2,382 policemen tested positive while they were on duty between April&May. Among them, 2,204 have already recovered while 5 deaths were reported.
Hmmmhttps://t.co/ZM2b5f7cOO
Although the left-wing activist didn’t make any comment, the fact that he shared a general news report, with mentioning that the cops were vaccinated and 5 of them had died, makes it clear that he posted this only to further his anti-vaccine propaganda. This can be concluded because he left out a key detail from the report.
The report states that out of the 5 deaths, only 2 of them had taken Covid-19 vaccines. And significantly, both of them had comorbidities. Three of them were not vaccinated, which was deliberately not mentioned by Bhushan. He knows that a large number of people don’t click on links shared on social media. Most people just read the post on Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp, and scroll away, not bothering to read the shared report.
Therefore, among more than 22.5 lakh followers of Prashant Bhushan, a large number of them will read that five cops in Uttarakhand died from Covid-19, and as 90% of the cops are vaccinated, they will assume that all 5 were vaccinated. Alone this is not a big issue, but this is how subtle propaganda works, by spreading such misleading information bit by bit.
The report states that 2,382 policemen tested positive while they were on duty between April and May. Among them, 2,204 have recovered and 5 have died. It also says 93% of them were fully vaccinated by two doses of vaccines, which means around 2215 cops were fully vaccinated. Among the vaccinated, 2 died, which means the fatality rate among the vaccinated is less than 0.1%. And it needs to be remembered that both of them had other ailments.
All the vaccines that have been approved for Covid-19 till now offer protection in the range of 50%-80%. Therefore, more than 99.9% protection rate is a very encouraging result.
It is also notable from this data is that 3 people died from 167 non-vaccinated cops. Therefore, the fatality rate among non-vaccinated cops were 1.8%. That is more than the all-India fatality rate of 1.1%, and almost similar to the rate for Uttarakhand, which is 1.99%. This also means that fatality rate for non-vaccinated people is 20 times of the fatality rate for vaccinated people.
Although the cops in Uttarakhand are not representative of the general population, the numbers show how the vaccines can make a huge difference in fatality rate of Covid-19. The fatality rate for non-vaccinated cops were 1.8%, while the same rate for vaccinated cops were 0.09%, which is a huge difference.
Despite this, Prashant Bhushan tried to imply that people are dying despite taking vaccines, completely ignoring the fatality rate difference between vaccinated and non-vaccinated people.
While Prashant Bhushan directly does not say that vaccines don’t work, he regularly shares articles that claim the same. Just a day ago, he had shared a report saying that 57 scientists had questioned the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines. This is despite the fact all the vaccines currently in use have undergone phase I, II and III trials, where their safety and efficacy are already tested.
