Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

The media coverage regarding King Biden‘s vaccine rollout has been rather positive. Various publications have gushed over how COVID-19 vaccine distribution has been “ramping up” or “accelerating”. Unlike former President Trump’s vaccine rollout, which was widely panned by the media because former President Trump’s lofty goal of having 20 million vaccinated by the end of 2020 took 3 weeks longer than expected. Now, however, it is nothing but sunshine and rainbows; universal, glowing admiration for King Biden‘s vaccine distribution:

Now sure, King Biden had a bit of a rocky start with his monarchy initially saying that the previous administration had left “no plan”, only to have this almost immediately refuted by Dr. Fauci. And then there was the original goal of 100 million doses in 100 days, which was exceedingly underwhelming considering that on the last day Trump was in office the seven day average for total doses administered was already 959,072 per day. Achieving a mere 100 million doses in 100 days then amounted to an uncontested layup. But, King Biden revised the goal to 150 million doses in 100 days and all has been peachy keen since. There is even a website designed to track progress towards that, arguably, still mild, goal. And this website is very forgiving to King Biden clearly stating:

“Use this graphic to follow whether the country is on track to reach the administration’s goal. Note that total vaccinations given — as in first and second shots, both shots counting individually — are what’s being counted. This is not the same as full vaccinations, which are first and second shots counted as one. Biden specifically mentioned shots in arms in his statements about the goal.“

With all of this fantastic coverage by the objective mainstream media, whose journalistic integrity is obviously beyond reproach, it was with great surprise then when King Biden recently came out with extremely harsh words and blame for his predecessor over COVID-19 vaccine procurement and distribution.

Hmm…curious. So we here at The Objective Observer decided to take two seconds and have a closer look at the vaccine distribution numbers from the CDC. What we found is that either the media is purposefully misleading the public or the media is incapable of doing basic, trivial data analysis.

The graph below is from the CDC website tracking vaccine doses administered within the ~~United~~ States. The column highlighted in gray denotes the last day of the Trump administration. Now, nine days after Trump left office, one can see a drop off in the seven day average of total doses administered (red line) that spans four consecutive days but overall the trend seems positive and even seems like it is indeed “accelerating”, the slope of the line increases somewhat.

We have confirmed that this is the graph that is the basis for the NBC News vaccine tracking King Biden‘s stated goal of 150 million does in 100 days. How? We spent several days checking both websites and the seven day average stated by both websites were identical each day, except for that one odd day when the NBC News website stated a seven day average that was 10,000 doses above the CDC’s, but we’ll chalk that up to a “clerical” error.

However, switching to “People Receiving Dose 1” and “Daily Count” paints a completely different picture:

Here we see that the number of people receiving their first does of a COVID-19 vaccine has leveled off. This means that the pace of people receiving their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine decelerated. If daily first doses remain at their current plateau of under one million then we will be well into next year before all Americans even have their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.

The difference between the two graphs is solely the people receiving their second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, shown below.

As one can see from the graph, during the Trump administration’s first days of even being able to administer a second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, initially, the Trump administration actually did a slightly better job at accelerating the distribution of second doses than King Biden. But, remember that there is a 3-4 week delay between doses so King Biden benefitted from there being far more people that were even eligible to receive a second dose versus Trump. Given that Trump held back half of the vaccine doses in order to ensure that people received their second dose, a policy King Biden reversed upon taking office and that the entire “acceleration” of vaccine distribution is due to these second shots…one has to wonder exactly when this short term “boost” is going to come to an end.

The only objective conclusion that one can draw from this rather trivial data analysis exercise is that vaccine distribution under King Biden is in real trouble. First time vaccine distribution has effectively stalled and the rosy numbers being reported by the media are simply an aftereffect of King Biden benefiting from those individuals who were already given their first dose under Trump and Trump’s decision to hold back vaccine doses to ensure people received their second shot. We can’t help but wonder whether King Biden might have spent his time better working on COVID-19 vaccine distribution rather than signing a record breaking number of executive orders and allowing the Senate kangaroo court to engage in a literal show trial.

But, the media’s misleading of the public does not stop there. It seems that most media outlets wish to provide COVID-19 vaccination numbers in terms of total doses administered. By that measure, the ~~United~~ States topped 44 million doses administered as of the last day of vetted results when this article was written. That’s not horrible, a little over 14% of the population.

However, if one takes the time to look a bit closer, those individuals that are fully inoculated number less than 25% of that figure, just over 10 million, or about 3% of the population. Not so good. That…that is horrible. At that rate, doing some rough math of 7 million second doses administered from January 20^th until February 7^th (18 days) indicates that, optimistically, fully inoculating all Americans would take about 1,100 days, or just over 3 years. And that’s just the current population, it does not account for illegal immigrants flooding over the border during that time. Yeah, King Biden had better get his sorry ass moving, and quick.

Now, it has been widely reported that former President Trump left a note for King Biden within the resolute desk as per custom. And there has been widespread speculation about the contents of that letter. Well, we here at The Objective Observer have a theory that former President Trump actually left three letters in the Resolute desk along with a note reading “If you get into trouble, open these numbered letters in order.”. King Biden just opened the first letter and it read “blame your predecessor”. We can’t be certain what the second letter might contain, but if we are right, the third letter most assuredly states “write three letters”.