When the U.S. Surgeon General’s office asked states to supply it with examples of Covid-19 misinformation, it probably did not expect what it got from Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita: a list of false statements from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials.
Rokita’s letter, dated May 2 but released to the public Monday, was compiled with the help of his co-signatories, Stanford University medical professor Jay Bhattacharya and former Harvard University medical professor Martin Kuldorff.
In their letter, the three “agree” with the Surgeon General “that misinformation has been a major problem during the pandemic,” but they contend that much of the misinformation has come “from the CDC and other health organizations.” To prove it, they cite several categories of such disinformation.
First on the list is the vast overcounting of Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations. “CDC has not distinguished deaths where COVID-19 was the primary cause of death, where COVID-19 was a contributing cause of death, or where the death was entirely unrelated to COVID-19, but they incidentally tested positive,” the authors write. Various studies, which they cite, have shown that Covid-19 prevalence has been overcounted in both the United States and other developed countries.
Officials downplayed or denied that natural immunity exists while pushing the vaccines partly on the basis that they would prevent transmission of the virus. These assertions were baseless given that the existence of natural immunity was established early in the pandemic and that the vaccine trials “were not designed to determine whether they could also limit transmission or prevent death,” the letter reads.
School closures harmed children, potentially for the long term, without providing any real benefits, assert Rokita and company. The decision to shutter schools, they note, “was based on false claims that it would protect children, teachers, and the community at large.” Yet Sweden’s example of keeping schools — and most of the rest of society — open with no negative consequences put the lie to such notions by mid-2020, even as U.S. school closures dragged on.
Officials’ suggestions that “everyone is equally at risk … from COVID-19 infection” when, in reality, “there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of hospitalization and death for the old relative to the young,” led the public to wildly overestimate the dangers of the virus and to demand lockdowns and other harmful policies, says the letter.
The authors also criticize the notion that “there was no reasonable policy alternative to lockdowns,” pointing to their recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration and again to Sweden, which has “had near-zero overall excess death” during the pandemic. “Lockdowns,” they declare, “are an aberration — a sharp deviation from traditional public health management of respiratory epidemics — and a catastrophic failure of public health policy.”
“Contrary to assertions by some public health officials, mask mandates have not been effective in protecting most populations against COVID-19 risk,” write the three men. Cloth masks are useless, and even N95s have only limited effectiveness, particularly when worn by untrained individuals.
Mass testing of asymptomatic persons combined with contact tracing and quarantining, the letter argues, have “failed to substantively slow the progress of the epidemic” but have “imposed great costs.” Asymptomatic individuals rarely pass the disease on to others, the PCR tests are flawed, and tracing the contacts of everyone who tests positive overwhelms the system. “In the U.K., an official government review determined that its 37 billion pound investment in contact tracing was a waste of resources.”
Finally, the authors scold “public health leaders” for making “the suppression of COVID-19 spread to near-zero levels the endpoint of the pandemic” because “SARS-CoV-2 has none of the characteristics of a disease that can be eradicated.” The technology to eradicate it does not exist, lockdowns are unfeasible and would have to be imposed worldwide even to have a chance of being effective, the vaccines lose efficacy over time, and many animals can host the virus and transmit it to humans.
If the CDC wants to be taken seriously again, it ought to heed the words of Rokita’s missive because, as he and his co-authors observe, the government’s falsehoods regarding Covid-19 “have shattered the public’s trust in science and public health and will take decades to repair.”
