CNN reported that the vice president of respiratory development at Moderna insinuated that hospitals have come close to being overwhelmed by flu and COVID patients over the last few years:
But this doesn’t pass the “smell test” because hospitals were not even close to being overwhelmed in the first year of COVID, as has been reported on elsewhere. But a good way to check for hospital capacity being challenged is to look at the weekly rate of ICU admissions per million persons. With flu, 5% to 10% of patients end up in ICU:
But the weekly rate of flu hospitalization itself can reach up to about 100 per million (10.0 per 100,000):
Doing the math, that means that the weekly rate of ICU due to flu could reach up to 5 to 10 per million (5% of 100 is 5; 10% of 100 is 10). Let’s use 5 ICU admissions per million as a cutoff value. In the last few years in many nations, COVID ICU admissions were below that:
In the week of 13 Nov 2022, for instance, the top weekly rate of ICU admission for COVID above is for Chile, at 3.88 weekly ICU admissions per million. The evidence suggests that Moderna “fails the fact-check” by insinuating that hospitals were at risk of being overwhelmed by COVID patients during the last few years.
Moderna gets 4 Pinnochios out of five for the insinuation that COVID came close to overwhelming hospitals, and if they had stated it more boldly, then they would have gotten 5 Pinnocios out of five.
Reference
[Moderna scientist insinuates that hospitals had been at risk of being overwhelmed] — https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/health/anti-vaccine-sentiments-combination-flu-covid-mrna/index.html
[between 5% and 10% of those hospitalized with flu go to ICU] — https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883944118300327