Long COVID kills? That's still unproven
What is certain is that the CDC is performing bad science
Recently, the CDC issued a new report saying that long COVID can kill! It captured the headlines, largely by an uncritical press. But what precisely does it show?
Basically, what the CDC did was collect all deaths where COVID19 was coded as immediate or proximate cause. Then they just hit control+f looking for these key terms:
If any of those were present it was a long covid death.
Imagine a person hospitalized with COVID, on the vent for 20 days, and then someone wrote COVID19 as the cause of death, and then casually said ‘post covid’. This would be listed as a long covid death. Are you serious?
Do you know what the CDC didn’t do? They didn’t interview providers. They didn’t review the medical record. They didn’t look in multiple datasets. They didn’t look across countries. They basically didn’t do anything a respectable scientist would before making such a bold, public claim.
I struggle to be polite about their analysis. This is widely used to craft a narrative that long covid can kill, but they have no such evidence. The quality of the science is so poor that I don’t think it could withstand the scrutiny of a 6th grade science fair.
Why is this happening? The CDC has tens of thousands of employees, and massive financial resources. Is there no one there who is a careful scientist?
And how can they claim misinformation is a problem when they have repeatedly been a promoter of misinformation (see my past analysis about their mask data)?
I know the CDC thinks this graph (below) proves something, but it just proves that doctors who fill out death certificates— usually tired interns or transient docs— have changed their language over time. This would be natural when bombarded by these terms in the media coverage of long-covid, oft portrayed as a mass disabling event. It cannot prove that long covid is happening more lately.
In short, this is a bad week for science.
Unvaccinated people should have their insurance premiums raised, and long covid killed 3500 people. Neither is a scientific claim. In my mind, its not much better than thinking 5G caused covid. Two deranged poles. One which thinks the virus is harmless, and the other which thinks it was the reason you changed lanes without signaling.
I am not sure how this story ends: But science is in crisis.
Totally agree with VP’s comments here. Unfortunately, doing abysmal science is not new for the CDC.
I worked for the US Dept of Health and Human Services for years - in a different agency, not the CDC, but working closely with them. I was shocked at the complete lack of scientific rigor I saw.
To give one example: They had kicked off a study that they were touting as a “definitive study” on a particular topic. I emailed a fairly high level CDC rep involved with the study to request their data collection plan. She replied, “What do you mean by data collection plan?” I swear, this is verbatim.
After I explained to this senior CDC scientist what a data collection plan was, I learned that - they didn’t have one. They had enrolled numerous clinical sites into the study, and were going to take “whatever data the clinics gave them.” No attention to the fact that the data from different clinics might not be combinable because the data elements were defined differently, and no attention to the many other considerations a careful scientist would attend to in developing a rigorous data plan.
But, my impression was that they already knew what outcome they wanted from the study, and knew that they were going to massage the data so as to produce that outcome. So why be rigorous about collecting it, as it wasn’t a real study anyway?
Everything the CDC has put out for years has been political claptrap to support some agenda. DeSantis said it best when they recently formed a legitimate science panel to review the CDC's generally wrong pronouncements: "The CDC is not serving a useful function; it's really serving to advance narratives rather than do evidence-based medicine."
(If you want to see more CDC corruption, this one about defensive gun use, then try this report well backed with receipts: https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2022/12/15/damning-report-by-stephen-gutowski-reveals-how-cdc-ditched-vital-data-and-bent-over-for-gun-grabbers/)
Vinay is correct -- almost nothing the CDC does would get through a sixth grade science fair (I have judged several). Nor should it get through any kind of peer review except that CDC NEVER peer reviews their stuff (wonder why?) and that ridiculous article about traffic deaths from failing to take a spikeshot did get through peer review. So maybe Vinay is right...perhaps there is no hope.
Or, as Vinay and I and others do, repeatedly pointing out at every possible time that almost everything people are being instructed to do (masking, antisocial distancing, quarantining, spikeshotting) is virtually useless will eventually make a dent. I have to hope so...I have wasted an awful lot of words on it all.