(John Ransom, Headline USA) Days after they quietly revised the pediatric death toll downward with no fanfare, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) finally broke its silence about how it overstated the Covid deaths amongst children by 24 percent since the start of the pandemic said Epoch Times.
“CDC constantly reviews our COVID-19 data to ensure its accuracy,” Jasmine Reed, a spokeswoman for the agency, told The Epoch Times in an email, a review that only took 24 months to correct.
Reed added that the adjustment was made “because CDC’s algorithm was accidentally counting deaths that were not COVID-19-related,” according to Epoch Times.
That’s a sophisticated way of saying that a math error was to blame.
The error has caused several medical experts to issue apologies for blindly following the CDC’s numbers and thus misleading the public, according to the journal Science-Based Medicine.
But at the same time, some of the experts also took a shot at those who predicted the overcounting problem, even while they apologized.
“I reported the inflated CDC data in a recent article here and issued the following correction upon learning of the CDC’s error,” wrote Dr. Jonathan Howard, neurologist and psychiatrist based in New York City wrote in Science-Based Medicine.
Howard then said that said that those who minimized the risk of the virus and overstated the risk of the vaccines bore some blame because those critics never corrected their own errors.
I too deleted a tweet with the wrong CDC numbers (it was a CDC error)
I have to say: I found it bizarre & rather upsetting to see people on Twitter celebrating that Covid has killed “only” 1300+ kids
Vaccination can help prevent more child deaths; kids aren’t supposed to die https://t.co/w0NSJRYMD6
— Prof. Gavin Yamey MD MPH (@GYamey) March 18, 2022
Other public health experts who helped precipitate the Covid crisis followed Howard’s lead.
“I too deleted a tweet with the wrong CDC numbers (it was a CDC error),” tweeted Gavin Yamey, professor of Global Health & Public Policy at Duke University, but followed up with an attack on critics who couldn’t resist saying an I-told-you-so.
“I have to say: I found it bizarre & rather upsetting to see people on Twitter celebrating that Covid has killed ‘only’ 1300+ kids,” added Yamey.
But Yamey and Howard didn’t reckon on the costs that their misinformation has caused children based on school closures, social isolation and the never-ending anxiety kids had to endure that they were at risk of imminent death from Covid, an assumption now proven to be untrue.
One study published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics found that depression and anxiety symptoms doubled in children compared to pre-pandemic times.
Another study found that economic costs to kids to be approximately the size of the annual GDP of the United States.
“This generation of students now risks losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings in present value, or about 14 percent of today’s global GDP, as a result of COVID-19 pandemic-related school closures,” said a study by World Bank-UNESCO-UNICEF.
That’s the math that the CDC really got wrong and the experts refuse to acknowledge.
