ATLANTA (LifeSiteNews) — With little fanfare, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed tens of thousands of COVID-19 deaths from its online tracker this week, in the latest apparent instance of the “science” being massaged in accordance with the political needs of Democrat leadership.
The Epoch Times reports that prior to March 15, the CDC’s data tracker website “listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others,” but on that date “cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000.”
“Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” claimed the agency, which cautions on its website that its data is not comprehensive. Still, the timing of the revision comes as some Democrats have been retreating from politically-unpopular COVID restrictions, and fits a broader trend of downward data revisions getting less attention than more dramatic findings.
“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue,” Kelley Krohnert, the Georgia resident who identified the latest discrepancy, told Epoch via email. “It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID.”
The downgrade follows several public statements from top government health officials this year that marked a dramatic reversal from their prior COVID warnings. In January, CDC director Rochelle Walensky explained the agency’s decision to halve the recommended isolation time for the COVID-afflicted based in part on “what we thought people would be able to tolerate.” That month, White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that hospitals were over-counting child COVID hospitalizations, because “if a child goes to the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID, and they get counted as a COVID hospitalized individual. When in fact, they may go in for a broken leg, or appendicitis, or something like that.”
In fact, evidence has always suggested that children’s risk from COVID was exaggerated. Last summer, a team of researchers with Johns Hopkins School of Medicine “analyze[d] approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with Covid in health-insurance data from April to August 2020,” and found a “mortality rate of zero among children without a pre-existing medical condition such as leukemia.” The lead researcher, Dr. Marty Makary, accused the CDC of basing its advocacy of school COVID vaccination on “flimsy data.”
By contrast, the toll of governments acting on pre-revision COVID data has been high, with evidence suggesting that lockdowns were either ineffective at saving lives, or what benefit they offered was outweighed by associated harms.
Last March, the left-wing Associated Press admitted that in America, “California and Florida have experienced almost identical outcomes in COVID-19 case rates,” despite the former imposing some of the most draconian lockdown measures in the country and the latter remaining mostly open, and that the mortality gulf between Connecticut and South Dakota was similarly small despite the wide gulf in their approach to lockdowns.
In April 2021, Simon Fraser University economics professor Douglas Allen published a study that concluded that while lockdowns saved 22,333 years’ worth of lost life they also caused 6.3 million years of lost life, making the policy’s net long-term harm 282 times worse than its benefits, thanks to the combined toll of canceled or delayed care for other medical issues, and the psychological harm of lost jobs and social isolation, among other factors.
In October, another study by Marine Baudin, Jérémie Mercier, and Denis Rancourt attributed much of the U.S. COVID death toll to “persistent chronic psychological stress induced by the long-lasting government-imposed societal and economic transformations during the COVID-era [which] converted the existing societal (poverty), public-health (obesity) and hot-climate risk factors into deadly agents.” Most recently, a meta-analysis published in Johns Hopkins University’s Studies in Applied Economics found that “lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality” but have “imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted.”