The CDC Spread Misinformation by Repeatedly Exaggerating COVID Risk During the Pandemic

In theory, public health institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) are supposed to provide evidence-based, objective guidance to help people make informed decisions. This is especially true during such a public health emergency as a pandemic. It is how such a public health institution is to build trust among its constituents. What did the CDC frequently do throughout the pandemic instead? The CDC repeatedly misrepresented and exaggerated data. 

This is a phenomenon that I mentioned at least a couple of times over the past three years. In 2021, a study was released saying that the probability of outdoor infection of COVID was about 0.1 percent (Bulfone et al., 2021). Walensky took that study and said that the study showed the risk was 10 percent. Walensky essentially exaggerated the risk of catching COVID outdoors by a whopping 100-fold! With regards to masks, the CDC cherry-picked inferior studies to exaggerate the effects of mask-wearing while wrongfully ignoring and dismissing more robust studies showing that masks have no effect on COVID transmission. 

This does not even get into Walensky's other instances of faux pas or how the largest teacher's union pressured the CDC to recommend a stricter mask policy in schools, even though readily available data at the time showed that children were not shown to be super-spreaders of COVID. The issue is that it was more than one or two times that the CDC made this faux pas of misrepresenting data. A pre-print study from University of California-San Francisco researchers and one independent analyst highlighted 25 instances that the CDC falsified information (Krohnert et al., 2023). Of the 25 instances, 20 of them were exaggeration of COVID risk. Here are some of my favorites:

• July 26, 2021: The CDC said that the Delta variant was as contagious as chicken pox. In order to arrive at that conclusion, the CDC overstated the rate of transmission of COVID while understating the rate of transmission of chicken pox. 
• July 27, 2021: 0.04% of COVID deaths were in children age 0 to 17. The CDC said that it was 4%. Yet another exaggeration of 100-fold!
• June 17, 2022: CDC claimed that COVID was a top-five killer of children. Not only did their figures include children deaths with incidental COVID, but they chose a longer timespan for the COVID deaths than the other causes of death. 
• August 12, 2022: CDC tries to scare people by saying that children and teen COVID hospitalizations were continuing to climb. It turns out that those hospitalizations reached their peak two weeks prior. 
• December 30, 2022: The CDC reported that the XBB.1.5 variant accounted for 41% of new infections in the US at that point. A week later, they reviewed that figure to 18 percent, which is outside of the original 95 percent confidence interval. 

There were other instances of exaggerated pediatric death counts. There were also temporary spikes in hospitalization data that were most likely due to data lags, but the CDC took it as another opportunity to needlessly scare people of COVID. As the study pointed out, the 13 instances in which the CDC exaggerated mortality risk were pediatric in nature. The infection fatality rate was about 1,000 times lower than the elderly. Yet the CDC went on a fear-mongering campaign about children's safety that ended up having multiple negative impacts on children and making them downright miserable for the past three years.  To quote the study:

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. These errors have been made repeatedly and were likely to have affected discussion of pandemic policies. During the years the errors occurred, CDC's guidance repeatedly called for restrictions being laced on children, including school closures, mask mandates, and strong recommendations for vaccinations and multiple boosters even among children who have recovered from the virus." 

What is even scarier about all of this is that the authors admit that their methodology likely underestimates the number of times the CDC played fast and loose with numbers. These were not instances of data interpretation, but demonstrably false numbers. As the study indicated, "In order for the CDC to be a credible source of information, they must improve the accuracy of the data they provide." 

The authors could not be more right. Whether it is climate change, banking, or COVID, we need to understand the costs and benefits of a policy before implementing it. The government made many mistakes. Specifically in assessing COVID risk, it almost exclusively focused on the cost of COVID while ignoring multiple costs of interventions, including economic, social, education, and non-COVID health costs. If the government cannot even follow science or change course when it is patently wrong, there is little home for proper pandemic guidance for when the next pandemic comes.