Portugal's COVID-19 vaccination taskforce coordinator Henrique Gouveia e Melo (Image: EPA/Antonio Cotrim)

There’s widespread scepticism about COVID-19 data coming from counties across the world. Sometimes, like in the case of Russia or China, nationalism and political imperative leads to generally accepted under-reporting of COVID-19 infections and deaths. In other cases, like India’s deadly second wave, a lack of testing infrastructure and huge population make accurate reporting virtually impossible.

While infection and to a lesser extent, fatality data is often taken with a large grain of salt, vaccination data is generally accepted as being accurate across the world. That leads us to the Western gold medallist in vaccinations: Portugal, which has been feted as being among the “world’s leaders” in vaccinations, and having “reached the point of group protection and nearly heard immunity”. 

It’s been centuries since Portugal led the world during the age of discovery, and with its claimed 86% full-vaccination rate, Portugal sits behind only Gibraltar, Pitcairn and the UAE in the vaccination race. The hero leading the campaign, former military commander (sound familiar?) Henrique Gouveia e Melo, is reportedly greeted with cheers and ovations at crowded vaccination centres.

But is Portugal the Usain Bolt of vaccination rollout — or the Ben Johnson? 

Like most of continental Europe, Portugal got off to a relatively slow start vaccinating its residents. By May 1 2021 it had only vacated 9% of people (by that time, Israel had vaccinated 55% of its total population). Since then, Portugal claimed to have increased full vaccination rates to 86% of all people:

The first and most obvious red flag is the sheer scale of alleged vaccinations being so much higher than the rest of the developed world. Spain, Portugal’s neighbour and the second most vaccinated country in Europe, has double-jabbed 79.8% of people. The next best European nation is Denmark at 75.9%. But it’s not just the high number which seems curious — Portugal allegedly reached that world-beating level without vaccinating anyone aged under 12, and only half of all kids aged between 12 and 17. 

With so many kids not yet vaccinated, and 13% of Portugal’s population aged under 14 — that means to hit the 86% number, virtually every single resident over 18 would need to have been vaccinated. Even ignoring the likely level of vaccine hesitancy, there would be a small proportion of the population who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons. While Portugal, like Australia, has fairly low levels of hesitancy, a survey indicated 3.6% of Portuguese had previously refused a vaccination for their children for far less controversial and more established vaccines like measles.

Then there’s the second red flag: fatalities. While far fewer than the 291 daily deaths reported in February, Portugal is still recording seven COVID-19 deaths per day. With a highly vaccinated population, the infection-fatality rate should be around 0.1%. A quick extrapolation implies that Portugal would be likely to have 4000 to 7000 daily infections amongst its 10 million population. While a degree of breakthrough infections is inevitable, Portugal’s fatality rate makes no sense in a country claiming to have vaccinated every adult. 

Even more unusual is Portugal’s positive test rate of 2% (which is a more accurate indicator of infections as it takes into account lower testing rates), which is not sky-high by global standards but isn’t that low either. India, Australia, Italy and France are all recording lower positive rates currently. Again, a vaccination rate approaching 100% of adults should lead to a lower positivity rate, especially compared to France (68% vaccinated) and Italy (72%).

Interestingly, the ACT — which leads Australia’s vaccination rates — has given a first dose to a world-leading 99.34% of all people aged above 12 (like Portugal, Australia does not yet vaccinate kids). However, the ACT has given a first dose to only 83.8% of all people. It simply makes no sense that Portugal could have vaccinated a higher share of its population than the ACT’s 99.34%. The numbers simply do not add up.

Portugal has clearly done an excellent job in vaccinating a high proportion of adults, the 98% drop in fatalities is testament to that, but like most things COVID, it appears the truth doesn’t quite match the spin.