CDC Admits COVID Deaths Were Overinflated Because Of “Error”

Get our free mobile app

The story doesn't lead on cable news networks, and the agency let it out pretty quietly, but the data supports what many experts online have been saying for months. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that it was "correcting" their COVID deaths numbers, and removing tens-of-thousands of deaths from their totals. Including removing over 24% of all COVID deaths among children they had previously reported.

According to Reuters:

"The health agency, in a statement to Reuters, said it made adjustments to its COVID Data Tracker's mortality data on March 14 because its algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related."

The CDC admits that it was counting deaths that were not COVID deaths, as COVID deaths. Blaming an "algorithm" for the issue. Even though the adjustment was across all ages, the numbers among childhood deaths were the most striking. With 416 childhood deaths being removed from the CDC's counts, which represents 24% of the childhood deaths they had previously listed.

This makes the timing of Jeff Zients leaving his position as White House COVID-19 Coordinator very interesting. Zients announced he was leaving the same week the CDC let this information out.

This isn't the first time that the CDC has had to publicly address runaway COVID numbers. Earlier this year, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had to address Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor who stated, while debating a case at the Supreme Court, that “We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators”.

The CDC has been accused of overinflating COVID numbers throughout most of the pandemic. Including a highly publicized showdown with Florida last year.

The website WSWS talked to Greg Travis, a data analyst with decades of experience in the healthcare industry, who said he'd never seen anything like this before. He stated:

“Sometimes you will see small variants in WONDER [a separate CDC COVID-19 data tracker] where deaths decrease by a few dozen one month to another, but I’ve never seen the toll in a specific age group start shooting up and then come crashing down. And I have never seen the number of deaths they’re drawing data from come down. That’s never happened.”

This news has reignited debates online over the data collection, as well as mitigation measures taken against COVID, especially among the medical community:

Changes to data like this, and the resistance to address serious concerns like natural immunity and risks for those that are healthy vs. those with comorbidities, are creating a larger obstacle for health officials if they want to try to reimplement heavy-handed mitigation measures again.