The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is misleading us about the risk of being unvaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 (CoV2).
They are doing this through two basic errors. First, they appear to be using outdated population estimates that grossly undercount the actual number of unvaccinated persons in the United States. This leads to artificially inflated estimates of COVID-19 case rates among the ever-shrinking unvaccinated population.
Second, they appear to be counting every person for whom they cannot verify vaccination status as an “unvaccinated person.” In many cases, it appears that it is taking health agencies weeks, if not months, to properly match COVID-19 hospitalizations with vaccination status, and we have no assurance that it is ever done properly at all. This has led to some jurisdictions quietly publishing significant corrections to their data weeks after initial publication — and after the media and public health officials have already run with the erroneous numbers. This is leading to both overstatement of the COVID-19 case rate for unvaccinated persons and understatement of the same rate for vaccinated persons.
A re-examination of the data without these errors will show that while the COVID-19 vaccines have been effective at reducing hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19, their effectiveness has been grossly overstated in America.
Consider these charts, which were widely promoted by American media in order to support the desirability of COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Based on these and similar charts, the nation’s leading health officials, including Dr. Fauci and President Biden, have erroneously claimed that you are up to 97 times more likely to die if you are not vaccinated and boosted against COVID-19.
Here’s the deal: Unvaccinated individuals are 97 times more likely to die compared to those who are boosted.
Protect yourself and those around you by getting vaccinated and boosted today.
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 5, 2022
There is one huge problem with these claims: They are not true. Not only are they not true, but they are wildly out of sync with what we know about the efficacy of the vaccine in other countries, such as England, Scotland, and Denmark, where the difference between mortality and hospitalization rates for the unvaccinated and the boosted is in the single digits.
The CDC’s own website tells us where the problem begins. If you examine the CDC COVID Data Tracker page for “Rates of COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by Vaccination Status,” the footnotes indicate, “An unvaccinated person had SARS-CoV-2 RNA or antigen detected on a respiratory specimen and has not been verified to have received COVID-19 vaccine.” Get it? If the health agency cannot specifically verify that you have been vaccinated by matching you with a vaccine record, you are automatically placed in the “unvaccinated” pile of cases.
However, a couple things should be obvious. First, matching deaths or hospitalizations to a vaccine record is a process that is a) imperfect and b) takes time. This means that, inevitably, the data will initially count at least some people as “unvaccinated” who have, in fact, been vaccinated, just because the records have not been matched up yet. And there is ample evidence, which we will discuss later, that this can take weeks or months to do properly. This has the obvious result of skewing both death and hospitalization numbers toward the unvaccinated population, at least in the initial publication of data.
A second factor — and perhaps more significant — is introduced by the CDC in its computation of what the entire population (and unvaccinated population) actually is. According to the CDC’s website, “Weekly age-specific incidence rates by vaccination status were calculated as the number of cases or deaths divided by…unvaccinated (obtained by subtracting the cumulative number of fully vaccinated and current estimates of partially vaccinated people from the 2019 U.S. intercensal population estimates)…”
In other words, the CDC calculates the estimated unvaccinated population in the United States by subtracting the total known number of fully vaccinated people (which it gets from fairly reliable data that is provided by state and county health agencies when vaccinations are reported to them) from an estimated total population count of the whole country. The estimate they are using is the 2019 U.S. intercensal population estimate.
This method of estimating the population is due to introduce significant errors into the CDC’s calculation. For one thing, the further the intercensal population estimate gets from an actual census, the less accurate it is presumed to be, and the 2019 intercensal estimate is as far as you can get from an actual census before a census is taken again. Second, the United States population grows every year, meaning that the further we get from 2019, those estimates get even more erroneous. For 2021 cases, there have been three years of population growth that have been ignored, meaning that both the total population count and the estimate of the non-vaccinated population are wrong.
By stacking the information deck against the public, the public health community and government are gambling with our lives. We deserve and should expect an honest accounting of COVID data devoid of bias and opacity. If truth and transparency are provided, the populace would trust these public institutions, which would lead to healthier outcomes for everyone.
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Authored by Clayton Cobb via TheBlaze.com
For more content from Clayton Cobb, please visit his Substack here.
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