The CDC recently presented misleading data to the FDA on the risk of COVID-19 to children, this apparently to justify the vaccination of those as young as 6 months old. Our health authorities have fully established that they are willing to lie to us for our own good, but now they are apparently willing to lie to each other as well.
The pre-print study showcased was an attempt to present COVID-19 as a leading cause of death among children aged 0-19 (not sure why 19 rather than 18). It was presented to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) earlier this month just before the committee voted to recommend the shot for kids under five years of age.
The slide presentation based on the preprint study claimed that COVID-19 ranked 5 in underlying causes of deaths among minors. But a fact-check by Covid-Georgia.com labels this assertion as “completely and utterly false.”
The pre-print it’s based on includes significant errors that invalidate the results. And the slide makes additional errors on top of the pre-print. It’s really disturbing that data this poor made its way into the meetings to discuss childhood Covid, and that it took me less than a few minutes to find a major flaw (and then I found many more as I looked deeper).
In response to criticism, Dr. Flaxman, a corresponding author of the study, posted on Twitter that an updated preprint was in the works, while maintaining “our major conclusions are unchanged.” He also added “Covid is a top 10 cause of death in children of all ages, and the #1 cause of death from infectious / respiratory diseases.”
On June 28 that revised preprint was posted, but an analysis of the update showed further problems, including “changing the time period for the Covid deaths to the worst 12-month period in the pandemic.” A side-by-side comparison of the two versions of this study can be found here.
The original presentation used COVID death numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) which included “deaths where Covid is listed anywhere on the death certificate, not just the underlying cause of death,” according to the analysis. “Death certificates include a single underlying cause of death, along with potentially several contributing causes of death. The NCHS data includes both, which overcounts Covid deaths because it includes death that had a different underlying cause.”
Astonishingly the authors of the updated preprint claim “we only consider Covid-19 as an underlying (and not contributing) cause of death.” But the numbers used in the preprint correspond with the NCHS data that clearly does not make this distinction.
The preprint uses the NCHS data which shows 1,433 child deaths related to COVID (underlying or otherwise) while the CDC has parsed that data showing 1,088 child deaths caused by COVID (a 24% reduction). However, when comparing COVID to other leading causes of death among children, the preprint study then uses actual underlying causes as its classification metric for everything but COVID. This certainly has the appearance of a deliberate attempt to overcount COVID-caused deaths among children.
Another issue deals with the time periods for when the deaths took place. In the study’s ranking of “Leading Causes of Death” among children, for every cause but COVID the data collected is from a single year (annualized deaths) but for COVID the data collected is presented both annualized (12 months) and cumulative (over 26 months). So COVID as a cause of death is ranked twice for each age group.
In a table ranking the leading causes of death among children aged 1-4, COVID is listed both as #8 (annualized) and #5 (cumulative). Worse, the CDC slide presentation that summarized this data only shows the cumulative data of COVID deaths and only for the broader age category of 0-19.
Yet even with that overcounting, a child (age 1-4) is still less likely to die from COVID than from a car crash, a pool accident, a fire, an assault, or self-harm.
However, when looking only at annualized data (12 months for all causes) then we can add influenza, pneumonia, heart disease, and birth defects, as all are more likely to kill a child under 5 than is COVID.
Then there is the problem with using rankings to show the impact of COVID on children:
Rankings overstate the impact of Covid, because the top few causes of death far outweigh the causes further down the list. For example, in ages 1-4, accidents account for almost 25 times as many deaths as Covid-19 on an annualized basis. Furthermore, for each of the 4 age groups covered by the CDC slide, the very broad “accidents” is the leading cause of death. If we break that down further, causes of death like drownings, vehicle crashes, drug overdoses, would be individual causes of death greater than Covid in various age groups.
In other words: If we broke down the general category of “accidents” into multiple subcategories, the result would be to push COVID deaths farther down the chart and eventually out of the “top 10” category altogether.
When asked why they would use flawed research to promote the authorization of mRNA vaccines for children, the FDA responded by resorting to a technicality, explaining that it was not the FDA itself that presented the research in question, explaining that “FDA speakers in the June 14-15th meeting of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) did not cite the study in question in their presentations. FDA’s press release announcing the authorizations explains the basis for our determinations.”
No, it was a CDC speaker that presented the flawed study to FDA advisors at that VRBPAC meeting. This is a distinction without a difference.
This falsification is but the latest in a ongoing campaign to skew data in order to make SARS-CoV-2 look more hazardous to children than it currently is, as the data has consistently shown from the start of the pandemic.
To further illustrate this contemptuous narrative, here is a doctor from last year on the NBC show Today insinuating over 146,000 child deaths from Covid as of October 2021 (the actual number of child deaths at the time was less than 700).
The censorship of information related to the current pandemic goes in one direction only. One poll showed that 41% of registered democrats believed that at least 50% of unvaccinated people had been hospitalized because of COVID-19 (the real number is less than 1%, even for someone sixty years old). And Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her support for vaccine mandates, made this absurd claim: “We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in serious condition, and many on ventilators.” At that time, the actual number of children hospitalized with Covid was somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000, yet how many of those kids were hospitalized because of Covid was unknown as was how many were in serious condition or on ventilators.
These are but a few examples of a type of misinformation that is allowed to flourish, indeed proliferate, on social networks and in our legacy media.
M. Danko
July 10, 2022
Terse.blog