Covid 19 deaths are off by 40%: Minnesota senator Dr. Scott Jensen and Representative Mary Franson call for an audit of death certificates in a video released late December 2020, summarized by a Washington Examiner’s article December 22, 2020.
After reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state, obtained from MN Department of Health (anyone can request this), 40% did not have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death, yet were reported as Covid-19 deaths. Examples of this include death from physical injuries, a drowning, dementia, stroke and multi-organ failure.
“For 17 years, the CDC document that guides us as physicians to do death certificates has stood, but this year, we were told, through the Department of Health and the CDC, that the rules were changing if COVID-19 was involved. …If it’s COVID-19, we’re told now it doesn’t matter if it was actually the diagnosis that caused death. If someone had it, they died of it,” Jensen said.
Dr. Jensen said that the CARES Act distributed $22-billion to hospitals through Health and Human Services that had a high number of Covid-19 positive inpatient admissions. HHS reported that $10-billion was awarded to 395 high-impact hospitals (161+ Covid-19 patients). For every patient treated at the hospitals with a Covid-19 diagnosis, they received between $50,000 and $76,975 payments. 395 hospitals received an average of $25-million, a powerful financial incentive to fraudulently misdiagnose everything as Covid.
Minnesota hospital system that received awards include Abbot Northwestern, Carris Health, District One Hospital, HCMC, Fairview chain (Southdale, St. Joseph, University), Maple Grove Hospital, Mayo, Methodist Mercy, North Memorial, Regions, Sanford Worthington, St. Cloud, St. Francis, and United Hospital. There were no small centers in this list. Medium-sized or small hospitals are therefore going to struggle in absence of these CARES funds.
Hospital administrators have told Dr. Scott Jensen that hospitals are indeed massaging the diagnoses in order that the hospital will have enough ‘cases’ to receive the CARES funds.https://week.com/2020/04/20/idph-director-explains-how-covid-deaths-are-classified/embed/#?secret=TcchUs8Ria
“Illinois Department of Public Health Director, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, said in April,
“If you were in hospice and had already been given a few weeks to live, and then you also were found to have COVID, that would be counted as a COVID death. It means technically even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had COVID at the same time, it’s still listed as a COVID death. So, everyone who’s listed as a COVID death doesn’t mean that that was the cause of the death, but they had COVID at the time of the death,” Dr. Ezike outlined.
Essentially, Dr. Ezike explained that anyone who passes away after testing positive for the virus is included in that category.”
And CDC admits it: “When COVID-19 is reported as a cause of death on the death certificate, it is coded and counted as a death due to COVID-19.”
One key issue has to do with the way cause of death is recorded in the case of comorbidities.
In 2003, the CDC published the “Medical Examiners’ and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting” and “Physicians’ Handbook on Medical Certification of Death.” Part I of a death certificate includes the immediate cause of death, listed in order from the official cause of death (a) down to underlying causes that contributed to death (in descending order of importance, as b, c, d).
Part II of the death certificate includes other significant conditions that are not related to the underlying causes in Part I. According to the report:[iii]
“Comorbid conditions have been listed on Part I of death certificates as causes of death per the CDC Handbook since 2003 to ensure accurate reporting can be developed. Comorbidities are seldom placed in Part II. Part II is typically the section where coroners and medical examiners can list recent infections as underlying, initiating factors.
Prior to the CDC’s March 24th decision, any co-morbidities would have been listed in Part I rather than Part II and initiating factors such as infections including the SARS-COV-2 virus, would have been listed on the last line in Part I or more commonly in Part II.”
After the March 2020 guideline change, however, comorbidities were to be listed in Part II, which meant COVID-19 could be listed exclusively in Part I:[iv]
“This has had a significant impact on data collection accuracy and integrity. It has resulted in the potential false inflation of COVID-19 fatality data and is a potential breach of federal laws governing information quality.”
New CDC Guidelines Inflate COVID-19 Deaths by at Least 16.7-Fold
The report examined COVID-19 fatalities through August 23, 2020 and compared them using the CDC’s guidelines that had been in place since 2003 and those put into place in March 2020 for COVID-19. You can see the results in their figure below, which shows, “Had the CDC used the 2003 guidelines, the total COVID-19 [fatalities would] be approximately 16.7 times lower than is currently being reported.”[v]
Image source: IPAK PHPI, COVID-19 Data Collection, Comorbidity & Federal Law: A Historical Perspective October 12, 2020, Figure 9
‘This Leaves Me Speechless’
On Twitter, investigative health journalist Nicolas Pineault wrote, “If this is accurate, this leaves me speechless.”[vi] Indeed, not only did the CDC leave no records as to how it made the decision to change how deaths are reported, but some estimates suggest they may have resulted in an inflation of COVID-19 fatalities of over 90%, while violating U.S. law:[vii]
“Previous reports detailed the substantial changes on how causes of death were forcibly modified by the CDC through the NVSS, and how together, both federal agencies inflated the actual number of COVID-19 fatalities by approximately 90.2% through July 12th, 2020.
We believe this deliberate decision by the CDC and NVSS [National Vital Statistics System] to deemphasize pre-existing comorbidities, in favor of emphasizing COVID-19 as a cause of death, is in violation of 44 U.S. Code 3504 (e)(1)(b), which states the activities of the Federal statistical system shall ensure ‘the integrity, objectivity, impartiality, utility, and confidentiality of information collected for statistical purposes.’”
The public health implications of an artificial inflation of COVID-19 deaths are immense, as rates of anxiety, depression[viii] and suicidal thoughts[ix] are on the rise — a direct result of restrictive COVID-19 health policies.
Only with accurate data can individuals and health officials make decisions to truly protect health, and as the report noted, “It is concerning that the CDC may have willfully failed to collect, analyze, and publish accurate data used by elected officials to develop public health policy for a nation in crisis.”[x]
Joel Hay and CDC mortality data