Nearly 25% of all deaths of children attributed to Covid have now been removed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The new numbers for children were in addition to the deletion of tens of thousands of deaths all deaths. It’s an interesting admission because doctors and others that had made the claim of inflated minor deaths were previously considered to be spreading “false information.” Individuals who made the claims were banned from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and other social media platforms and derided in the news media. The CDC action vindicates those individuals.
The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15.
“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC asserts on the site.
The CDC, belatedly, now acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete.
The inflated statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited 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.
Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates.
The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000.
The agency declined to provide a comment to news outlets and puts all of the agency’s data into question. Since the beginning of the pandemic, critics have accused the CDC of including deaths in their stats that were not specifically from Covid. For example, according to the CDC, a death from a vehicular accident was attributed to Covid if the autopsy revealed the deceased had Covid at the time.
Statiticians critized that type of Covid reporting saying bad data was driving bad Covid mitigation efforts across the nation, including lockdowns, masking mandates and even Congressional spending.
The CDC was forced to readjust its death count in August 2021 “after the identification of a data discrepancy.”
“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue. It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID,” Krohnert says.
Some journalists and doctors have been citing the tracker data while others use a tally that is managed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has been described by the agency as more reliable.
The NCHS tally, which is compiled from death certificates, currently lists 921 deaths involving COVID-19 among children and some 966,000 deaths involving COVID-19 among other age groups.
The deaths in the tally include people who died with COVID-19 and people who died from COVID-19, a CDC spokesperson in January. COVID-19 was listed as the underlying cause, or the primary death cause, on about 90 percent of death certificates at the time.
Some of the deaths listed by the CDC appear unrelated to COVID-19. For instance, deaths from drowning as a cause of death; several others were listed as being from a gun discharge, according to a review of the death codes.
For now, the update on the tracker was described as “great news” by Dr. Alasdair Munro, a clinical research fellow for pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton, given that nearly a quarter of the pediatric COVID-19 deaths had vanished.
But Munro, writing on social media, called it “slightly worrying that this data was being used widely in the US to guide or advocate for policy.”
Some people called for the CDC to issue a public apology or at least announce such updates, similar to how some lower-level agencies have made clear lowering their death counts.
“It’s outrageous to quietly footnote such a consequential error,” Jessica Adams, a former regulatory review officer at the Food and Drug Administration, said on Twitter.
–Wire services