Sept. 5, 2023 - Epoch Times
05:37
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| Some of your listeners may know, and you may know, I've been involved in a lawsuit against a bill in California that was signed by Governor Newsom that actually went into law that was going to prohibit doctors from spreading so-called misinformation or medical misinformation as it was Deemed by the California Medical Board. | |
| And so we had a lawsuit with the new Civil Liberties Alliance called Hogue vs. | |
| Newsom against that bill. | |
| And basically the problem with the bill was the same problem with this article. | |
| So I wrote a substack where I outlined 10 different areas where I thought the article in JAMA Network Open was incorrect in the way that they accused certain physicians across the country of spreading quote misinformation. | |
| I actually think this is dangerous to set a precedent in our medical literature where we're relying on The government and the government's impression of what the truth is or what they decide, determine together they think is the quote consensus at one moment of time and then like sort of adjudicate what we think is the truth or say what we think is the truth based on that dictate basically from the government or what the CDC says at | |
| that moment. | |
| Because science, as you know, Jan, it's an ongoing process, and so we constantly need to be updating what we know and questioning what we consider to be the current scientific consensus. | |
| And so this, yeah, the way that the authors did this, I think, sets a dangerous precedent, and that's why I wanted to address it. | |
| Let's dive in here, okay? | |
| You've got, you actually identified 10 areas. | |
| It's kind of a perfect blueprint almost. | |
| And so let's start with, you know, even just the death, the number of deaths during COVID, you notice that that was something that was incorrect. | |
| Yeah, so this was the first sentence of the article that the authors state as of May 11, 2023, an estimated 1,128,000 deaths have occurred due to COVID-19 in the U.S. So this has been an issue that they actually cited the CDC's COVID data tracker, which has been problematic. | |
| It's not based on death certificate data. | |
| It is based on basically a case. | |
| It's basically just reported by the local health departments, like suspected cases of COVID-19 deaths, and they haven't been adjudicated according to the death certificates yet. | |
| So, we have shown actually in an article that I wrote with Vinay Prasad and Kelly Cronard and Allison Haslam that this data tracker actually overstates pediatric deaths. | |
| We found by 25%, but now it's up to closer to 35% it's overstated pediatric deaths. | |
| For people over 65, it seems to have slightly understated their death count. | |
| When you look at the National Center for Health Statistics data, which is what we use to look at causes of death. | |
| For every other cause of death, we use a death certificate. | |
| So when you look at the National Center for Health Statistics, you actually end up, you get a similar number of deaths that were attributed to COVID when you look at people who died with and From COVID, or when you look at when they had COVID as the underlying or one of multiple causes of death, you get a similar number of like 1.1 million. | |
| But when you subtract out the cases where COVID wasn't the underlying cause of death, As I state in the article, you actually get closer to about 980,000 deaths with COVID-19 as an underlying cause, according to the death certificates. | |
| So it was about a 15% overestimate that they stated in their number. | |
| And if you actually look at Scandinavian data where they have adjudicated the death certificates individually, they have found that over the course of the pandemic in Denmark and then in Nordic countries as well in Finland, there was about a 35 to 40% incidental death rate, meaning that deaths that were initially attributed to be due to COVID were deaths with COVID and not from COVID-19. | |
| And that has increased with time. | |
| They now, in 2022, had about 65 to 75% of deaths. | |
| In Denmark, we're incidental, we're with COVID, not due to COVID. So we really need to get a way to get our US system to be aligned with what these Northern European countries are doing in terms of counting our COVID-19 deaths and making sure that they are From, you know, due to COVID and not just with COVID-19. | |
| And so I used that point to bring up an ongoing problem in the U.S. And it actually, there's multiple reasons this is happening, that there's also financial incentives For hospitals to list COVID-19, to keep testing for it, to list it on patients' diagnoses in the hospital, and then to get payments for funeral costs if you die from COVID-19. |
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