It was a striking statistic. According to a Victorian chief health officer update in January, almost 47 per cent of Victorians who had recently died from COVID-19 were unvaccinated, despite this group comprising a tiny proportion of the state’s population.

But information obtained by this masthead via freedom of information has revealed this data, covering three months in 2022 and 2023, was incorrect by a large margin. The number of unvaccinated deaths being reported was, at a minimum, inflated by close to double the true rate.

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