Group Calls On Authorities To Investigate CDC Over Misinformation About Child COVID Deaths

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials who spread misinformation about child COVID-19 deaths should be investigated for violations of the agency’s scientific integrity policies, a watchdog group says.

Drs. Katherine Fleming-Dutra and Sara Oliver both claimed that COVID-19 deaths among children were higher than they actually were, and refused to correct the misinformation after they were told the correct figures, the complaint says, citing reporting from The Epoch Times.

The CDC’s scientific integrity guidelines say that the agency holds accountability and integrity as core values, stating in part that “all information products authored, published, and released by CDC for public use are of the highest quality and are scientifically sound, technically accurate, and useful to the intended audience.”

Protect the Public’s Trust, the watchdog that filed the complaint, urged the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general to investigate the apparent violations. The CDC is part of the HHS.

“Ideally, they would investigate the incident and what happened and determine whether or not certain officials within the CDC violated the agency’s scientific integrity policies. We believe that that they have,” Michael Chamberlain, director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told The Epoch Times.

The inspector general’s office said it received the complaint and declined to comment further. The CDC and the HHS did not respond to requests for comment. Fleming-Dutra and Oliver have not returned repeated inquiries.

Misleading Claims

Fleming-Dutra and Oliver both said that COVID-19 was a leading cause of death among children while presenting data to the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel before the panel voted to recommend the CDC allow all children in the United States between 6 months and 5 years of age receive a Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

Slides from their presentations cited a non-peer reviewed paper from British scientists, who analyzed death certificate data from the CDC.

The scientists later corrected the study after admitting they didn’t fully understand how the certificate data was reported.

Within days of the presentations, both officials were alerted to having spread misinformation, emails obtained by The Epoch Times show. But the officials brushed off the concerns, and never issued a correction.

“The general sentiment [is] that ‘even 1 death from COVID that’s preventable is too many, regardless of how you count them,'” Oliver wrote in one of the missives.

No evidence exists showing that vaccines protect against death among small children.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, later referred to the study, and the website of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the vaccine advisory panel, still cites it. Neither has acknowledged the update.

It remains unclear why the CDC officials did not perform their own analysis of the certificate data.

“I don’t understand why they don’t seem to know how to use their own resources,” Kelley Krohnert, a citizen researcher who alerted the study’s authors to the errors, told The Epoch Times. “It’s very strange.”

Public Trust

Apparent violations of the scientific integrity policy include relying on a non-peer reviewed study and not discovering the massive overestimate of child COVID-19 deaths, the complaint from Protect the Public’s Trust says.

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