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Remember all the way back to…August 3, when I wrote that the available data made clear that the U.S. government’s leading medical authorities, its President, and many of its politicians and Mainstream Media journalists were engaged in fear-mongering over the new-ish Delta variant of the CCP Virus? I documented that although the new strain has indeed spread rapidly, even the (overwhelmingly circumstantial) evidence cited said absolutely nothing about the most critical issue: the new variant’s ability to cause serious illness and death.

Indeed, I noted, the ability of all versions of the virus (1) to spread asymptomatically, or (2) with symptoms too mild to be reported, and the consequent inability to measure its presence in the population accurately, combined (3) with death rates that have remained at rock bottom, strongly indicated that its lethality rate was low. Flawed definitions of virus-caused hospitalizations further complicated even efforts to gauge Delta’s severity.

Today, however, I’m reporting that the misinformation propagated about the Delta threat is even worse than I originally thought. The problem? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), whose statistics, conclusions, and guidance form the basis of so much of the virus-related information received by the public, and of so much of the mitigation policy adopted by government at all levels along with private business (e.g., most recently, vaccine passports), has been using figures that are hopelessly out of date. 

The misinformation episode came this past Thursday, when CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky answered a reporter’s question about the data backing up the Biden administration contention that Delta’s proliferation, plus the rise in virus-related hospitalizations, had produced a pandemic almost exclusively “among the unvaccinated” that’s creating a new public health emergency serious enough to justify sweeping vaccine mandates and other new public health as well as economic curbs.

Here’s what Walensky said: “So those data were data that were from analyses in several states from January through June and didn’t reflect the data that we have now from the Delta variant. We are actively working to update those in the context of the Delta variant.”

She did add that “I do want to reiterate, though, that based on the data we’re seeing — and we don’t have fully updated numbers — universally, as we look at our hospitalizations and as we look at our deaths, they are overwhelmingly unvaccinated people.”

But her initial response revealed that the information the agency has been principally relying on have nothing to even with vaccinations, much less Delta. And that’s not because the CDC has been slipshod in this respect. It’s because it wasn’t until May that even half the total U.S. population was partially –not fully – vaccinated. In fact, as of early April, the share was only about 25 percent. (See here for the figures.)

So since the vast majority of Americans hadn’t been fully vaccinated for most of the six-month period from which the CDC come – as the agency obviously knew – of course the vast majority of hospitalizations would be of the unvaccinated. And please keep in mind those aforementioned flaws in the definition of CCP Virus-related hospitalization and the lack of data on what age groups dominated the hospitalized population whether properly counted or not – since the pathogen’s severity and lethality are so highly concentrated among the relatively old, and  with underlying health problems.

The focus on January-June also weakens the linkage between virus hospitalization rates – even given all the definitional flaws – and the Delta variant. For the new mutation was at least as scarce during that period as vaccination. The first U.S Delta case wasn’t even recorded until March. In early April, it had produced just 0.1 percent of all American cases, according to the CDC. As recently as early June, the figure was just 9.5 percent. (See here for these numbers). By June 19, the figure was still just 30.4 percent, and it was only in the last 10 days of June into the first three days of July that Delta was responsible for half of infections. (See here for these numbers.)

Throughout the pandemic, their obsessive focus on the CCP Virus – as well as apparent obliviousness to its highly differentiated effects – has blinded the  CDC and other public health authorities to the grievous harm done by its mitigation advice to workers, small business owners, students, opioid addicts, not to mention to those suffering from a myriad of other health problems forced to stand at the back of various medical service lines. 

Walensky’s latest comments show that intellectual dishonesty now belong on the list of their blunders – and on the list of reasons for thoroughly overhauling their leadership and institutional cultures, and role in health policymaking as soon as possible. 

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