Plagued by Bad Data

Plagued by Bad Data

A countrywide shutdown is said to be necessary because of the deadliness of the coronavirus. But experts are simply guessing at death rates, and past pandemics were likely much worse. ...
William F. Jasper

Attempting to quantify mortality from diseases is a problematic enterprise, particularly on a national or global scale, due to the vast differences in access to medical care and the wide variability in monitoring, recording, and reporting from one locale or nation to another. The annual influenza (flu) death statistics from organizations such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), World Health Organization (WHO), and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) have been criticized for years by scientists, physicians, and epidemiologists as being methodologically flawed, bias infected, and wildly inflated.

In a 2011 study, Peter Nicolai Doshi of MIT wrote that “influenza vaccine effectiveness has been vastly overstated, predictive models of pandemic influenza are demonstrably flawed, and officials conflate true influenza with influenza-like illness.”

CDC admits that its flu death statistics are not actually confirmed cases but the result of “mathematical modeling.”

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