Agencies such as the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
and the
Food and Drug Administration
have condemned the threat of COVID-19 misinformation throughout the pandemic. Millions of dollars in grant money have been
awarded
to the National Science Foundation to aid in the development of new programs to detect and correct alleged misinformation as it relates to COVID.
Yet, in a recent preprint
report
from the University of California, San Francisco, epidemiologist Vinay Prasad and three colleagues claimed the CDC repeatedly trafficked in the kinds of specious, disproven, and demonstrably wrong falsehoods that these agencies purportedly sought to stomp out.
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According to Prasad and his co-authors, this spread of misinformation by the CDC is especially problematic given the number of people and institutions that “rely on the CDC for trusted information.”
“Many universities, healthcare facilities, day cares, churches, businesses, schools, sports programs, and camps defer to CDC guidance for COVID-19 precautions,” they noted.
However, in their report, Prasad and his colleagues documented 25 instances of the CDC disseminating demonstrably incorrect information. Twenty of these instances, they claimed, “exaggerated the severity of the COVID-19 situation.” Most of these, they stated, pertained to the risk of COVID to children.
“The errors we identified include basic facts like the number of children who have died, and the ranking of COVID-19 among causes of pediatric death,” they wrote. “These errors have been made repeatedly and were likely to have affected discussion of pandemic policies.”
One especially persistent bit of CDC-propagated misinformation stemmed from a
paper
posted to a preprint server in May 2022. The paper cited COVID as one of the top five causes of death in children and young adults of several different age groups.
However, according to Prasad and his colleagues, the original preprint cited by the CDC was riddled with serious methodological and statistical flaws.
Despite this, though, CDC representatives continually cited this study. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky appeared to
cite
findings from it at a June 2022 White House press briefing as she exhorted parents to vaccinate their children for COVID.
Later that month, the flawed study was
cited
on a CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices webpage and remained cited on that page for several months, even after the authors of the preprint corrected their mistakes and released an updated version of their paper.
Many other pieces of misinformation spread by the CDC concern overestimates of COVID deaths, as illustrated by an example
brought to light
in February 2022 by Kelley Krohnert, one of Prasad’s co-authors, in which a CDC data tracker overreported COVID deaths in children.
Based on the report of Prasad and his colleagues, these examples were by no means isolated incidents, with the general trend suggesting “the CDC consistently exaggerates the impact of COVID-19 on children.”
As the CDC did this, Prasad and his colleagues noted, it simultaneously “called for restrictions being placed on children, including school closures, mask mandates, and strong recommendations for vaccinations and multiple boosters even among children who have recovered from the virus.”
Prasad and his colleagues suggested there were likely more errors of a similar sort over the course of the pandemic that they failed to notice, given the amount of information on COVID the CDC put out over the past three years.
But even with only those Prasad and company were able to catch, it is curious these kinds of errors not only happened as often as they did but seemed to exhibit a relatively consistent pattern in the direction that conveniently supported policies favored by the CDC and pandemic bureaucrats, suggesting that incompetence might be too polite an explanation for the repeated occurrence and persistence of these kinds of errors.
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Daniel Nuccio is a Ph.D. student in biology and a regular contributor to the College Fix and the Brownstone Institute.
