Was CDC lying?
Post #1480
At this point, the title is more of a rhetorical question and interested parties might motion to have the question altered from “Was CDC Lying?” to “How Badly was CDC Lying?”
Public trust in institutions can be of value in advanced societies, but it should not be put into jeopardy by deliberate misrepresentation or intentional distortion of the truth. Back in August of 2023, the CDC told the House of Representatives that over 2,000 kids had died of COVID:
[click to enlarge]
Using a start-point of 7 March 2020 for an operational start of “COVID,” then there would be 3 years and 5 months (3.417 years) of observation time up to 7 August 2023. Using 2019 numbers, there would be 73.2 million persons from age 0 to age 17.
Along with the 2,292 deaths cited by CDC, a yearly death rate of 9.2 per million results.
But we have to ask the crucial question:
Do other nations find kids dying by so much?
Alex Berenson caught something that I had missed when sifting through a recent study in Madrid, Spain — which incorporated more than 2.75 million kids — no kids died. To find out if CDC is lying, I created a 99% uncertainty interval around their estimate, in order to watch out for overlap from child death rate estimates elsewhere:
[click to enlarge]
The red line at right shows the death rates consistent with CDC’s claim. The height of the red line indicates the probability of a rate, which is labeled at bottom in terms of yearly COVID deaths per million kids. The peak height is the value you get when you tentatively accept CDC’s claim of 2292 deaths among 73.2 million kids in ~3.5 years.
But the dotted vertical line to the left of the peak represents the 99% lower bound of an uncertainty interval formed around CDC’s claim. You do not have to be a statistician to know that something is wrong with CDC’s claim, after witnessing the “zero deaths” outcome of 2.765 million Spanish kids followed for 240 days.
The Madrid study mentions two other population-based studies in kids, one in Israel and one in England, and in neither of those was there any COVID deaths found among kids. These 3 population-based studies, along with the Ioannides estimate of the infection fatality rate for those under age 20:
3 non-adult deaths per million COVID infections
… it is easy to see that CDC is not just a little bit off of the mark, but way, way off. CDC’s claim implies ( 2292/3 = ) 764 million COVID infections in those 73.2 million kids (>10 infections/kid). It is a magnitude of error which cannot be chalked up to “measurement uncertainty” or to “unique circumstances” or what-have-you.
It is a magnitude of error that is best explained by outright lying.
Reference
[CDC gave bad numbers to Congress] — https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/e-and-c-republicans-open-investigation-into-cdc-database-overcounting-child-covid-deaths
[no kid deaths in Madrid study] — https://journals.lww.com/pidj/fulltext/9900/effectiveness_and_safety_of_covid_19_mrna_vaccines.1563.aspx
[just 3 deaths per million infections in kids] — Pezzullo AM, Axfors C, Contopoulos-Ioannidis DG, Apostolatos A, Ioannidis JPA. Age-stratified infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in the non-elderly population. Environ Res. 2023 Jan 1;216(Pt 3):114655. doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2022.114655. Epub 2022 Oct 28. PMID: 36341800; PMCID: PMC9613797. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36341800/