I am familiar with Simpson’s Paradox but I carefully read your linked article anyway and it truely is enraging to me when statistics is twisted to lie to people. I totally agree there is a very large amount of really bad headlines and non-expert pundit conclusions from right wing media. And it is harmful. I wish more people took the time to understand what statistics are actually saying. Unfortunately I think some portion of the population might just be incapable of properly understanding stats, it really is a hard and tricky subject.

That said, I don’t think the data from the OP’s CDC article is a case of Simpson’s paradox. The quoted statistic in the CDC article is that 74% of infected people were vaccinated. I am comparing that to the vaccination rate in MA of 69% (also from the article). The denominator in one stat is a strict subset of the denominator of the second stat. Simpson’s paradox requires disjoint denominators.

So that being the case, I would still like for actual experts to follow up on this data and come to some conclusion.