(Tony Sifert, Headline USA) The Florida Department of Health (DOH) has accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of unilaterally altering state COVID-19 data.
The CDC removed about 20,000 COVID-related Florida deaths from its national database, and took a full week before moving to correct its mistake, the press secretary for the Florida DOH told National Review.
“Instead of calling us and verifying these data, they decided to switch to a different field in the data set and just delete a bunch of our deaths,” Jeremy Redfern said.
It is perhaps relevant that on March 8, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo issued a guidance which stated — contrary to CDC recommendations — that “healthy children from ages 5 to 17 may not benefit from receiving the currently available COVID-19 vaccine.”
“Based on currently available data, the risks of administering COVID-19 vaccination among healthy children may outweigh the benefits,” Dr. Ladapo said in a press release. “That is why these decisions should be made on an individual basis, and never mandated.”
The CDC has recommended that “everyone ages 5 years and older get a COVID-19 vaccine to help protect against COVID-19.”
Redfern complained that the CDC’s continued irresponsibility — in August, the agency was caught exaggerating the Florida case count — caused a misinformation domino effect.
“The New York Times pulls from this public use data,” he said. “Researchers pulled from this public use data, this is where everybody would go to download all of these data if they wanted to build their own system.”
As recently as March two weeks ago, a CDC “coding logic error” led the Guardian to report on a nonexistent surge in U.S. child COVID deaths.
On Thursday, the Guardian issued a correction and said that the CDC had “inadvertently added more than 72,000 Covid deaths of all ages to [its] data tracker.”
