The CDC did not introduce a “major rule change” to increase deaths from COVID-19; there have been more than 490,000 excess deaths in the US to date

COMPLETE COMPLAINT: “The CDC has illegally increased the number of COVID’s fatalities by at least 1,600 percent”; “NVSS COVID-19 Alert No. 2 [issued in 2020 deemphasized] basic causes of death […] registering them in Part II, instead of Part I of death certificates […] This was a big rule change […] CDC’s 2003 Coroners ‘Handbook on Death Registry and Fetal Death Reporting and Physicians’ Handbook on Medical Certification of Death ”

REVIEW

An article published by Gateway Pundit in early February 2021 stated that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “illegally increased the number of COVID fatalities by at least 1,600 percent.” The article received more than 29,000 interactions on Facebook, including more than 14,000 shares on the platform, according to the social media analysis tool CrowdTangle. The complaint was also disclosed by other vehicles, as can be seen in this article from the WND and in this article from the National Archives.

The claim that the death toll from COVID-19 is inflated is not new, as an earlier Health Feedback review showed. The complaint aims to question the seriousness of the pandemic and the public health measures put in place against the virus, such as blockages.

The study cited in these articles was published in Science, Public Health Policy and The Law, a journal created by the Institute For Pure And Applied Knowledge (IPAK). IPAK was founded by James Lyons-Weiler, a former biostatistician who published false claims about vaccines, as reported here. Lyons-Weiler is co-author of a dubious study, claiming that unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children, despite the lack of evidence for this, as a Health Feedback review demonstrated. He also wrongly claimed that the virus that causes COVID-19 contains a man-made sequence, as detailed in this review of Health Feedback.

Despite being called “study”, the term is inappropriate, as it does not contain any of the characteristics that a scientific study would have, such as experimental observations and reporting of new data.

The claim is based on the claim that the CDC has introduced “a major rule change” for death certificate reports. According to the authors, this method differs from the 2003 Medical Examiner’s Manual on Death Record and Fetal Death Record and the Medical Manual on Medical Death Certificate, “instructing COVID-19 to be listed in Part I of death certificates. as the definitive cause of death, regardless of confirmatory evidence, rather than listed in Part II as a contributor to death in the presence of pre-existing diseases, as would have been done using the 2003 guidelines. ”

In support of this statement, the authors point to the document COVID-19 Alert No. 2, issued by the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS), which is part of the US National Center for Health Statistics. However, as we can see from reading the document itself, the CDC did not introduce a “major rule change” in the way deaths are reported, as the authors claim.

The purpose of the document was to inform the team that prepared the mortality data on the creation of a new CID code assigned to COVID-19, in order to “accurately capture COVID-19 mortality data on death certificates”. ICD stands for International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. It is a system maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO), not by the US CDC. According to WHO:

“The ICD is the basis for identifying health trends and statistics worldwide and the international standard for reporting diseases and health conditions. It is the diagnostic classification standard for all clinical and research purposes. The ICD defines the universe of diseases, injuries, injuries and other related health conditions, listed in a comprehensive and hierarchical way that allows:

• Easy storage, retrieval and analysis of health information for evidence-based decision making
• Sharing and comparing health information between hospitals, regions, environments and countries
• Comparisons of data in the same place over different time periods ”

The document did not stipulate that COVID-19 “would be listed in Part I of death certificates as the definitive cause of death, regardless of confirmatory evidence”. Instead, he stated that “COVID-19 should be reported on the death certificate for all the deceased where the disease caused or is presumed to have caused or contributed to death”, and that “Certifiers should include as much detail as possible possible based on your knowledge of the case, medical records, laboratory tests, etc. ”

In addition, by comparing the information in the 2003 guidelines with the NVSS guidance issued on April 4, 2020, entitled “Guidance for Certification of Death from Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19)”, we can see that the way the Parties I and II are registered has not changed.

In the NVSS guidance, it states for Part I:

“This section of the death certificate is for reporting the sequence of conditions that led directly to death. The immediate cause of death, which is the disease or condition that directly preceded death and is not necessarily the underlying cause of death (UCOD), should be reported in line a. The conditions that led to the immediate cause of death must be reported in a logical sequence in terms of time and etiology below it.“

And for Part II:

“Other significant conditions that contributed to the death, but are not part of the Part I sequence, should be reported in Part II. Not all conditions present at the time of death should be reported – only those that actually contributed to death.“

On page 14 of the 2003 review of the Medical Examiners ‘and Coroners’ Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting (see the full document):

“The cause of death section consists of two parts. Part I is to report a chain of events leading directly to death, with the immediate cause of death (the final illness, injury or complication directly causing death) on line (a) and the basic cause of death (the disease or injury that started the chain of events that led directly and inevitably to death) on the lowest line used. Part II is to report all other significant illnesses, conditions or injuries that contributed to death, but which did not result in the underlying cause of death provided in Part I.“

It is clear that, both in the 2003 manual and in the 2020 guidance, the way in which the report is to be made is identical. In short, the newspaper’s claim that there was a “major change in the rules” introduced by the CDC in the NVSS COVID-19 Alert is false. In addition, in another document that explained how the cause of death is reported, the CDC was clear in stating that “COVID-19 should not be reported on the death certificate if it has not caused or contributed to the death”.

The document also contains this misleading statement: “basic causes of death, also called pre-existing diseases or comorbidities”. Pre-existing conditions – such as asthma and diabetes, which put people at an increased risk of severe COVID-19 – can certainly be a cause of death. For example, a severe asthma attack can lead to suffocation. But due to modern medical interventions, many people with these pre-existing conditions are able to live normal lives.

However, when these pre-existing conditions co-occur with another disease, such as COVID-19, they weaken the patient’s ability to survive the later disease. Although the pre-existing condition contributed to death, it was not what triggered the process that led to death. Therefore, despite the presence of a pre-existing condition, the cause of death is COVID-19.

It is important to understand that patients with pre-existing diseases that were listed as COVID-19 deaths would not have died at that time if they hadn’t developed COVID-19. Confusing “basic causes of death” with “pre-existing diseases or comorbidities” is inaccurate.

As PolitiFact’s fact check on the same claim pointed out, experts found that the number of deaths from COVID-19 is more likely to be counted less, not in excess. Roderick Little, a professor of biostatistics at the University of Michigan, told PolitiFact: “If anything, I would expect CDC numbers to be underestimated, not overestimated,” citing “the lack of tests for COVID at the start of the pandemic” as a contributing factor to under-counting. Little also added that excess mortality rates “on the same date in previous years” would be a “more reliable image” of the COVID-19 death toll. In fact, the number of deaths in the US so far exceeds that of previous years by more than 490,000, according to this New York Times report. As a point of reference, the number of Americans killed in the First World War and the Vietnam War was reported by National Geography to be 53,402 and 58,220, respectively.