The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed from its data tracker website tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of the deaths the agency said had occurred among children.
In a statement to Reuters, the CDC said it made adjustments to the mortality data because the website’s algorithm was “accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related.”
“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error,” the CDC’s website states. “This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories.”
The agency also acknowledged COVID death data is not complete.
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Prior to the adjustment on March 15, the CDC attributed 851,000 deaths to COVID, including 1,755 pediatric deaths, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who tracks CDC updates. After the change, COVID-related deaths dropped to 780,000.
The change resulted in the removal of 72,277 deaths previously reported across 26 states, including 416 pediatric deaths — a reduction of 24% to 1,341, the agency said.
The CDC’s COVID statistics, used to justify which age groups should receive vaccines, were used by U.S. health agencies to support the authorization of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for children 5 to 11 years old.
CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky referred to the tracker’s death total in November 2021, while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5 to 11 years old.
Dr. Meryl Nass, physician and member of the Children’s Health Defense scientific advisory committee on March 19 wrote that the CDC cherry-picks the data it presents to the public to push its “health policies.”
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The agency hides most of what it has and then “blames its ‘outdated’ IT systems for the problems if it gets caught,” Nass said.
Health Feedback, a fact-checking initiative under the umbrella of Science Feedback, on March 1 said there “is no evidence COVID deaths have been over-counted,” and labeled posts stating otherwise as factually inaccurate, false and misleading.
Heath Feedback focuses on “correcting misinformation about vaccine safety,” and said it “reviewed multiple false claims” that COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths were inflated when “many public health experts believe that COVID-19 numbers are undercounted.”
Health Feedback also addressed death certificates listing COVID along with other health conditions, saying health conditions weaken a person’s resistance to disease and in “many such cases, a person with underlying health conditions wouldn’t have died at that time if it wasn’t for COVID-19.”