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Monday, October 31, 2022
CDC Officials Told They Spread Misinformation but Still Didn’t Issue Correction
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials were alerted that they spread misinformation about child COVID-19 deaths but still did not issue corrections, according to emails obtained by The Epoch Times.
Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver were told within days of presenting to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, in June that statistics from a preprint study they shared were wrong, the emails show. But after internal discussion about how to respond, neither the CDC nor the officials corrected the false information.
Fleming-Dutra and Oliver both referenced the study, which has not been peer reviewed, while the CDC’s advisers weighed whether to recommend the agency grant emergency authorization for COVID-19 vaccines for babies and toddlers.
The committee ultimately recommended the CDC authorize Pfizer and Moderna shots for children as young as 6 months of age and the CDC quickly accepted the recommendation.
A week later, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky appeared to cite the false statistics while urging parents to get their children vaccinated, despite no evidence the vaccines protect against severe illness and despite the clinical trials returning substandard or unreliable results for shielding against infection.
Kelley Krohnert, a citizen researcher and mother who flagged the preprint, triggered the internal discussions among CDC officials, according to the emails. When Krohnert pointed Fleming-Dutra to a blog post that detailed the issues with the study, Fleming-Dutra sent the email to others, including Oliver.
“I am not sure who this should go through. Let me know what I need to do,” Fleming-Dutra said.
Megan Freedman, a CDC health communications specialist, looped in a CDC spokeswoman, and they informed Fleming-Dutra that she and other subject matter experts “would need to determine if there’s any validity to the complaint.” If the complaint was deemed valid, possible next steps might include pulling the slide or adding a footnote, Freedman said.
Oliver jumped in, saying that Krohnert “appears [redacted], but there are my thoughts.” Her thoughts were redacted.
“I’m sure you guys can make it sound prettier, but something like this would be how I would respond,” Oliver said. “And the general sentiment that ‘even 1 death from COVID that’s preventable is too many, regardless of how you count them.'”
There’s no evidence any of the COVID-19 vaccines prevent death for small children.
“Love it – thank you for sending!!!” Freedman said.
A separate thread started after the Washington Post forwarded Krohnert’s email over a Post article that said COVID-19 is “a leading cause of death” among children. The article still links to Fleming-Dutra’s slide, which in turn referenced the preprint.
Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokesperson, sent the email to Fleming-Dutra, who forwarded it to Oliver.
“Kristen: [redacted]. Hope that helps?” Oliver replied.
“Thanks Sara! [redacted]. And really, I think the bottom line (which lots of ACIP members said today) is any death in a child (regardless of where it ranks on a list) is one too many,” Nordlund replied.
Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, health officer in Washington state’s Seattle and King counties, sent a link to Krohnert’s blog post to Oliver, Fleming-Dutra, and two CDC advisers, Drs. Matthew Daley—who also shared the misinformation—and Grace Lee.
“Great work today, as always. No doubt you’ve seen this and similar critiques of the mortality data presented. Will there be a response from CDC?” Duchin asked.
Correction
Seth Flaxman, a professor in Oxford University’s Department of Computer Science, and other researchers corrected the preprint after Krohnert flagged the issues to them. Their paper relied on death certificate statistics from the CDC. They initially said at least 1,433 deaths among people 19 and younger in the United States were attributed to COVID-19, but acknowledged in the updated version that the number was just 1,088.
The initial version “incorrectly used” the death certificate data, the authors said.
That sent the rank of COVID-19 among causes of death for children down. For infants under 1, for instance, it went from fifth to eighth.
Months later, Fleming-Dutra’s slide remains uncorrected, and nobody at the CDC has ever publicly acknowledged sharing the misinformation.
Fleming-Dutra, Oliver, Freedman, Nordlund, Daley, and the CDC did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for Duchin’s agency told The Epoch Times via email that the CDC replied to him in June.
The CDC “noted that the ACIP considers a multitude of data points in making their recommendations, so even if this specific pre-print paper was removed from consideration, the data overwhelmingly support COVID-19 as a cause of serious disease and death in young children, and COVID vaccines as an important way to prevent this,” the spokesperson said. “These ACIP decisions are made after reviewing the totality of the data and it is never one singular data point or analysis used.”
A spokesperson for the Stanford University School of Medicine, which employs Lee, declined to comment.
Lee promoted the false statistics during a meeting in September, and the official webpage for the committee she heads still lists the uncorrected figures. A spokesperson for the panel did not return an inquiry.
The Epoch Times obtained the emails through a Freedom of Information Act request.
‘Very Strange’
The confirmation that the CDC officials were made aware of spreading misinformation but did nothing is “super frustrating,” Krohnert said.
“They had all this internal discussion about the criticism and still the CDC director gets on TV and spouts the same criticized data,” she told The Epoch Times. “And at that point, Flaxman even said he was going to be updating their report.”
None of the CDC officials have ever replied to Krohnert.
The analysis from the British researchers utilized CDC data. It took Krohnert under an hour to run the same numbers. The Epoch Times also examined the data on the CDC’s site, corroborating Krohnert’s analysis. It’s unclear why the CDC scientists didn’t do the same.
“I don’t understand why they don’t seem to know how to use their own resources,” Krohnert said. “It’s very strange.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-cdc-officials-told-they-spread-misinformation-but-still-didnt-issue-correction-emails_4826960.html
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PARIS: A prominent French physician has won a stunning victory against charges that he denigrated official covid policies, with the French Order of Physicians holding that he was in fact obliged to speak out.
In its ruling, the French governing body for doctors found that Christian Perronne, 67, acted in the best interest of citizens and his profession in critiquing covid treatments and vaccines on social media, in national television interviews, and in a best-selling book.
“Dr. Perronne, an internationally recognized expert in the field of infectious diseases, was best placed to understand public health issues,” the translated decision stated. “If he spoke in the press about the action of the government and the pharmaceutical industry—as he was legitimate to do and even had the obligation to do so in this area which fell within his competence—he confined himself to publicly, but without invective, a discordant voice on a subject of general interest.”
In March 2020, as covid was exploding, Perronne emailed me a hugely encouraging study by Dr. Didier Raoult on successful treatment of covid with an old antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine. We both thought covid could quickly be tamed. But when President Trump “fast-tracked” the drug a day after my article on Forbes.com, the safe, generic treatment began a slow and tragic slide toward mainstream ridicule and rejection.
Perronne went on to sharply criticize the French government’s covid approach, including in a highly successful book entitled Is there a mistake THEY didn’t make?: COVID-19: the sacred union of incompetence and arrogance. The book, and statements Perronne made in a whirlwind of media interviews, soon got him into trouble with French medical authorities, which he believes was at the behest of French President Emmanuel Macron.
“At the beginning I understood things were going in the wrong way,” Perronne told me. Having served for a decade as overseer, variously, of the nation’s communicable disease, health security, and vaccine review commissions, “I think I knew how to manage such problems.”
Among Perronne’s other qualifications, he was vice president of the European Technical Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization for six years, which provides independent review and expertise on vaccines for the World Health Organization.
The Inquisition
Ten days before the ruling that absolved him, Perronne and I met for an interview in a Paris home, where my hostess, a retired physician, had read Perronne’s book, and a neighbor happily recognized him on the street as he was arriving. Perronne was facing the loss of his license to practice medicine based on complaints both by the Order of Physicians and an independent doctor who felt he had been attacked by Perronne.
Leading up to the charges, Perronne had found himself transformed. He had once been an esteemed public health expert, member of the infectious diseases faculty at the University of Versailles at Saint-Quentin, and one-time president of a professional society of infectious disease experts. But suddenly, he was a “charlatan,” he said.
“I was Galileo in front of the Inquisition tribunal,” he said of the September 13 hearing in the Disciplinary Chamber of the Order of Physicians. It nonetheless left him hopeful. In a huge show of support, an estimated 3,000 people had turned out in the streets outside the tribunal. “An extraordinary crowd was present,” the news outlet FranceSoir reported in a tweet with videos of cheering, sign-carrying admirers:
At the proceeding itself, Perronne sensed that his interrogators were going through the motions. “They were rather kind,” he said. “I think they were embarrassed with this affair.”
In an announcement of Perronne’s “complete victory,” his attorney, Thomas Benages, hailed the tribunal’s finding that doctors are entitled to debate and criticize health policies.
“By these fundamental decisions, the Disciplinary Chamber has reaffirmed the freedom of expression enjoyed by university doctors,” Benages wrote, “while highlighting the preponderant role played by Professor Perronne during the health crisis by bringing contradiction to the government and having”—as the decision stated—“‘a discordant voice on a subject of general interest.’ ”
The tribunal’s finding did not specifically endorse Perronne’s views, but rather his right to speak them. I asked him what he thought of the ruling.
“You can just say that I am very happy, since the Disciplinary chamber wrote that in view of my national and international expertise, I had not only the right to give a divergent opinion from the official policy, but it was an obligation for me to speak out, if I did not agree!
This statement is fantastic.”
As his lawyer wrote, “the Disciplinary Chamber simply came to reaffirm the values of our democracy.”
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/exonerated-in-france-one-persecuted-doctor-triumphs-over-covid-repression-686d8790
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com <b>(IMMIGRATION WATCH)</b>
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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