How CDC massages its data in order to terrify parents into vaccinating their babies and preschoolers

IF YOU TORTURE THE DATA LONG ENOUGH, IT WILL CONFESS TO ANYTHING--Ronald Coase

This story is about a particularly vile piece of disinformation CDC issued today to push vaccines on the most vulnerable, tiniest humans who can't say no.

As I have noted periodically for twenty years, and it was roundly confirmed 4 weeks ago in the NY Times, CDC spins and cherry-picks the data it presents to the public, hiding most of what it has. Then it blames its 'outdated' IT systems for the problems, if it gets caught. As the NYT noted, 

The C.D.C. has received more than $1 billion to modernize its systems, which may help pick up the pace, Ms. Nordlund [CDC's spokesperson] said. “We’re working on that,” she said. 

Dr. Vinay Prasad discussed several ways CDC generated bogus conclusions in an article titled, “How the CDC Abandoned Science” in the magazine Tablet last month.

CDC is not a public health agency.  It is a public propaganda agency that collects a massive amount of data. CDC marshals its huge data library to create presentations that support the current administration's public health policies.  CDC also has state of the art PR staff, as well as TV studios, and produces videos, radio spots and an enormous number of press releases that are distributed to the media.  CDC hosts many journalists at its Atlantia headquarters. Free junkets successfully cultivate US health reporters.

A 2007 Senate oversight report on the CDC noted the agency spent $106 million on the Thomas R. Harkin Global Communications (and Visitor) Center, and summarized its 115 page report with the following: “A review of how an agency tasked with fighting and preventing disease has spent hundreds of millions of tax dollars for failed prevention efforts, international junkets, and lavish facilities, but cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.”

If reporters want to speak directly to a CDC scientist, they must go through the public affairs office. CDC controls the flow of information out with an iron hand.

CDC may pay for getting its messages out.  As we learned last year, it paid Facebook for messaging, while Facebook donated $millions in advertising back to CDC. (Google is not letting me find the link, unfortunately.)  Last March, Mark Zuckerberg stated,

We’ve already connected over 2 billion people to authoritative COVID-19 information, and today as access to COVID-19 vaccines expands, we’re going even further and aiming to help bring 50 million people one step closer to getting vaccinated.

While CDC collects data from a much larger sample size, it often, as in the case I am about to discuss, only presents part of its dataset, and/or (as in this case) CDC chooses a specific, limited timeframe from which to select its data.  

The story that CDC is crafting today is that tiny children, under the age of 5, have been recently hospitalized at extremely high rates due to COVID, and therefore need to be vaccinated as soon as the vaccine is authorized for them. 

• Whereas, the true story is that most children have now been exposed to COVID and are therefore already immunized.  The huge Omicron wave conveyed a huge amount of immunity, which negates the need for vaccinations for the vast majority of us who now have immunity.

• Multiple studies have revealed that you are at higher risk of a vaccine-induced adverse reaction if you are already immune--but CDC cleverly never mentions this potential harm, or any other, to parents. 

• Many other studies show the immunity derived from exposure is much broader (works against more variants) and more long-lasting than from vaccination.  

• A theory gaining ground is that vaccination after infection may actually narrow and weaken the protection derived from infection-induced immunity, which could be an important reason to avoid vaccinations in the recovered.

Pediatric hospitalizations are now CDC's golden metric, because, since it has been shown the vaccines do not prevent infection or viral transmission, CDC had to stop saying getting vaccinated protects granny, because it doesn't.  But CDC didn't let that slow them down.  They immediately pivoted to creating stories about preschooler hospitalizations, even though they are rare.  Let's see how this is done.  

The current issue of the CDC's in-house journal, the MMWR, not only discusses hospitalization rates, but provides a downloadable poster that it hopes will be placed in pediatric clinics throughout the country.  Here it is:

Hospitalizations five times as high!  That's terrible!  Omicron must be much more severe for preschoolers than we were led to believe!

But wait a sec.  Let's compare the pediatric Delta wave with the Omicron wave using the data CDC provides.

The Delta wave lasted longer than Omicron but had fewer cases at any one time. Delta's wave looked those old graphs of 'flattening the curve,' while Omicron, being much more contagious, had a much taller peak while its wave ended much more quickly (what you would supposedly see if you didn't flatten the curve).  Actually, Omicron proved that all the gibberish about vaccines and masks and distancing couldn't flatten Omicron's curve at all.  But I digress.  Despite causing fewer total cases, the Delta wave led to about a third more pediatric hospitalizations overall than Omicron in CDC's dataset (790 vs 572), but they occurred over a longer time frame.   

CDC selected the age group that they hope to immunize soon for a report on pediatric hospitalizations from COVID. CDC has an ongoing data collection system called COVID-Net, in which it receives detailed information on COVID cases from 99 counties in 14 states. CDC’s report states,

“Complete clinical data were available for 97% (2,562 of 2,637) of hospitalized infants and children aged 0–4 years”

But CDC also says that while all hospitalizations were reviewed up until December 2021, for the months of December and January 2022 (the Omicron peak) CDC only reviewed some of the hospitalizations:

"some sites examined clinical data on a representative sample of hospitalized infants and children." 

In other words, CDC compared complete data for Delta with partial data for Omicron. CDC tried to explain away the discrepancy by claiming the partial data was a representative sample. But how did anyone know it was representative if the entire sample was not obtained? No self-respecting journal editor would let CDC get away with this, which is why CDC publishes its own journal, so it can.

In fact, the CDC had already planned its baby-toddler vaccine rollout campaign for February, but had to postpone it when FDA delayed the authorization process on February 10.  It turned out the Pfizer trial supported neither a reduction in cases nor sufficiently high antibody titer in the 2 through 4 year olds to meet the pre-specified level that was thought to be a surrogate for immunity. 

FDA was probably hoping to issue an EUA despite the lack of supporting evidence.  It had an advisory committee meeting scheduled for February 15 to vote on the proposal--until data from vaccinated 5-11 year olds in New York state collected by its Department of Health (from 365,000 5-11 year olds) showed the vaccine didn't work, after only a few weeks post immunization.  Somehow, some way, the lid was kept on this critical information after it had been presented to FDA and CDC in early February.  But the story got out in a preprint and in the NY Times on February 28, which informed us:

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer-BioNTech is much less effective in preventing infection in children ages 5 to 11 years than in older adolescents or adults, according to a large new set of data collected by health officials in New York State — a finding that has deep ramifications for these children and their parents.  

After about 6 weeks, protection against hospitalization dropped from a purported 100% to 48% in the 5-11 year olds, and protection against infection had dropped to a miserable 12%.

I don't think FDA could then cope with pushing vaccine on preschoolers when it wasn't working in the elementary school kids, whose dose was over 3 times higher.  FDA decided to wait until Pfizer waved its magic wand and produced better data. Brook Jackson, a former manager at a Pfizer COVID vaccine trial site, can explain how that happens here and here.

I'm guessing that in response to the abominable and furthermore official New York state data, which made it very hard to challenge, CDC spun up its spin doctors, resulting in this March 18, 2022 publication and poster.

Below is Table 1 from CDC's March 18 paper, published in its very own, non-peer-reviewed journal, the MMWR. Publishing in its own journal lets CDC get its messages out quickly, and protects CDC's so-called "science" from external reviewers' and editors’ criticisms and comments.  

Since the beginning of the pandemic, there were a total of 2,562 children aged under 5 years who were hospitalized with COVID in CDC's COVID-Net catchment areas in 14 states.  They comprised CDC's data collection.  Nearly half (44%) of the hospitalized children were under 6 months of age, who would be too young to be vaccinated under the proposed EUA.

The average length of their hospitalizations was 2 days during the Delta wave and 1.5 days during the Omicron wave.  Sounds like most kids were not that sick.  The deaths were the same for both Delta and Omicron:  0.5% of the children who required hospitalization died during each wave, although CDC carefully fails to tell us about comorbidities in the children who died or required ICU care.  While it is true that there were more hospitalizations per week during the omicron peak than during the delta peak, this happened because cases were compressed into a smaller time period for Omicron, since the virus whizzed rapidly through the population.  It took longer for Delta to reach its peak and trough, though there were, in total, more pediatric hospitalizations due to Delta than to Omicron. 

CDC managed to spin these data into an appearance of terrible danger for little kids:  5 times as many hospitalizations for Omicron than Delta--but only if you parse the data by week rather than by wave.  And if you parse the data by total number of cases (the area under the curve for each wave) there were many fewer hospitalizations per the number of cases for Omicron than for Delta.  (I have posted a NY Times graph, which uses CDC data for cases, at the bottom of this article. The Omicron wave is the mountain at the far right, and the Delta wave is the hillock that preceded it.)

Now that the Omicron wave is over, hospitalizations are way way down. CDC isn't making that part of its message, even though its article came out today and the data have been available for several weeks.  Telling us the current risk for kids is close to zero would ruin the narrative.

I have to vent about one more thing. I am really angry about a lie that CDC placed in its blue poster above.  It says, "Get vaccinated to help protect yourself and those too young to be vaccinated."  Except, since the vaccine does not prevent you catching the disease nor spreading it, how could vaccination protect you or those too young to be vaccinated?  It doesn't, and we have known that since at least last October, when Boris Johnson and Rochelle Walensky started to admit it. 

Grasping for talking points, despite being able to spin the data however it pleased, I guess CDC just could not shake itself loose from all its lies...

The bottom line is that the vaccine, designed for the original Wuhan virus, doesn’t do the job—and does it even less well in children. Although the safety data in children are very limited due to the tiny numbers enrolled in Pfizer’s trials, we know from older children and adults, using the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, managed by CDC and FDA, that COVID vaccines are the most dangerous vaccines ever used on a mass scale.

By giving manufacturers a vast liability shield the federal government has incentivized them to rush out their products and provide only the most minimal safety testing—because the way the Emergency Use Authorization law (the PREP Act) is writtten, they can only be charged with willful misconduct if they knew in advance of their products’ flaws. They are incentivized to NOT find out nor disclose the safety problems, because under the PREP Act, ignorance is bliss for the makers of EUA products.

Parents whose children are injured by experimental COVID vaccines will never forgive themselves. Please don’t be one of them.