It’s tough to follow the science when the scientists keep getting it wrong.
According to the Washington Examiner, pediatric deaths from COVID-19 reported on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID Data Tracker fell by nearly 24% after the agency resolved a “coding logic error.”
That’s quite a margin of error, there —and we based (destructive) policies off of these findings. We forced kids to mask up; scared them and scarred them; kept them inside and watched their mental health suffer —because of a “coding logic error.”
“Numerous scientific papers have established that it can be harder to hear and understand speech and identify facial expressions and emotions when people are wearing masks,” NPR reports. Masks can also slow a child’s emotional development and cause anxiety.
Someone at the CDC has some explaining to do: spokeswoman Jasmine Reed, come on down!
“An adjustment was made to COVID Data Tracker’s mortality data on March 14 involving the removal of 72,277 – including 416 pediatric deaths – deaths previously reported across 26 states because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related,” Reed says. “Working with near real-time data in an emergency is critical to guide decision-making, but may also mean we often have incomplete information when data are first reported.”
Ah, okay. So you messed up. Big time. The danger here is that while your Excel spreadsheet was on the fritz due to human error, news organizations took your data and ran with it.
“Prior to the fix, the CDC’s data had been used as the basis for articles published…by the Guardian and the New York Post that reported as many as a third of all child deaths from COVID-19 had occurred since the beginning of 2022 amid the omicron surge,” the Examiner reports.
Melody Schreiber, health and science contributor for NPR, the Washington Post and the Guardian, had to remove a half dozen tweets with the incorrect information. But nothing is really “gone” on the internet —thousands of people were misinformed.
The CDC has a transparency problem, keeping their data so close to the vest that it can’t be corroborated or challenged by outside, independent sources. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) blasted the CDC earlier this month for its “disturbing and shameful” lack of transparency.
“In the midst of a pandemic, it is unacceptable that CDC would withhold relevant data on COVID-19 that could inform the public and potentially save lives,” Johnson wrote to CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
Hang on while I check my data tracker to see how many American lives were negatively impacted by the CDC’s selfish claim over science and statistics…
Oh. All of them.
