I have to prep you with a little chuckle for this one.
If you’re on Twitter, you probably already know all about this, but I know that many readers of this Substack are not Twitter people. So for you fine folks especially, let me tell you that @KelleyKga, one of those great independent data geeks whom God will honor someday because she certainly isn’t being rewarded for it as she should be right now, has once again paid close attention and noticed two major data analysis errors in a slide used by the CDC committee that just recommended vaccination for young children. Let me direct you to her post for the full story, but I’ll give you a quick version here.
This was the slide.
In a nutshell, she discovered that there are two problems with the way data was analyzed to make this slide.
A. As you can see, it compares the number of children who died from COVID (so you would think anyway), to the number of children who died from other causes. For the “other causes” numbers, it used the number of children who died from various things in 2019. That’s fine. But then it compared those numbers to the number of children who have died with COVID since COVID appeared in the United States. In other words it ranked one year of deaths from other causes, with 2.5 years of deaths from COVID. That’s a sort of, “lose major points on your high school science lab report” error and here is here straight from the CDC.
B. And, for the non-COVID causes of death it used the number of children who died from cause X, where X must be recorded as the primary cause of death. But for COVID it counted any death where COVID was marked as contributing. In other words, yes, it’s our old “from or with?” problem where we count any death with COVID as a COVID death, a way we apparently don’t routinely tally deaths from any other condition or accident.
Both of the above serve to inflate the apparent risk from COVID to children, and probably inflate it substantially. Kelley tried to correct the data and found that, for young children, COVID should rank as the 8th or 9th cause of death, not the 4th or 5th… and it’s a very distant 8th or 9th as well, click through to her post to read her entire analysis.
So what can we conclude from this besides “the CDC messes up again!”?
Respect the independent data hounds
One, let’s just appreciate that all throughout COVID we have seen that independent, intelligent people, who are good with data, often have a better understanding of COVID data than the public health experts. And, thank you, they’ve shared their work publicly for all to see. Some of them have training in other sciences, some of them have training in computation… some I don’t know, but they are not “health” people, but they are data people, and they often understand health data better than many of the folks with health credentials, some of whom are crafting public health policy.
There are good sub-lessons here about, well, as Mark Changizi likes to say, “make your case, not your credentials”, and about not shutting the uncredentialed out of the debate, or assuming the credentialed are correct. From Francois Balloux:
And it’s true that this work in particular made a big splash, and got some people who do have “normal” health/medical credentials like Vinay Prasad involved. I do have optimism actually that, eventually, the scientific consensus will come to reflect what is actually true. But how long that will take, whether you will live to see it, and what harm might be done in the meantime is another matter.
The information problem for central planners still exists
Another lesson of this is that the “information problem” for central planners is still a problem. A major reason central planning often makes things worse, or produces major unforeseen negative side effects, is because planners just can’t know enough to intelligently plan the lives of millions of people. I think in the 21st century we had some thought, “but no, we have computers now, now we can!”. Well, computers have greatly increased the amount of information available, but that has actually made it more difficult to find those pieces of data that actually matter and use them well. (On a related note this is one reason, not the only reason but at least one reason, for why the internet has not resulted in a hyper-well-educated populace.)
I appreciated PoliMath’s comments on the whole situation. You know that when we see government misbehavior there is often this question of “incompetence or malice”? PoliMath is not a sort of person to usually attribute something to conspiracy, usually he thinks people are just idiots, or responding semi-rationally to some kind of perverse incentive. Some of his thoughts:
So to perhaps say that another way… something I say myself fairly often is that “everything that matters in science is down in the details of the data”. But the people on top of our institutions, the folks actually making the decisions, even if they could do it competently (which is another question) don’t have the time to go read all the details of the data, so they rely on people below them to correctly synthesize and summarize it for them. Unfortunately the people below them are idiots.
That is one interpretation anyway. There is too much data out there for the competent to examine it all seriously. So the old information problem for central planners still exists.
It is easy to mislead people with how you present data
I’ve certainly mentioned this before, but it is easy to fool people by how you choose to present data. One classic trick you should watch out for is the range of the y-axis. Does it start at zero? Because you can “zoom in” on any graph and make very small changes look significant. Whether because the person who made the graph had no idea what they were doing and just let Excel set the range, or because of an intentional effort to mislead, this happens all the time.
Here, I’ll keep this one quick but… what counts as a COVID death? Certainly the casual reader thinks he knows what a COVID death is, but does he really? “From” v. “with” can make a huge difference in the tally.
Or, Kelley points out, the number one cause of death for young children is “accidents”, and all types of accidents are just lumped into “accidents”. But you could separate that broad category into things like “car accidents” and “drownings” and “accidents involving drugs”. If you did so, of course nothing would really change, but you would push the “deaths from COVID” ranking further down the list. Nothing changed except the presentation of the data, but now COVID looks less serious than it did before. It’s easy to lead people around with such tactics.
We need better elites
The thought did occur to me that, had we better elites, this incident might be a great chance to rebuild some trust in public health. Just imagine the CDC Director coming forward to say “thank you for notifying us, here is a corrected set of data”, even if they didn’t change their overall recommendation. I think the odds of that happening are somewhere around 1% even with all the attention this has gotten, and that’s a problem. The CDC is fully politicized now in the progressive way, and progressives think admitting mistakes is a sign of weakness, and makes you vulnerable to political attack. That might be how politics operates, it sure isn’t how science is supposed to operate.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have elites that were actually competent, reliable, and trustworthy? Most people haven’t the time or competence to go check if the CDC slide is correct or not. You’re supposed to be able to just trust that the CDC slide is correct. But we live in a world now where it might very well not be. I do not know how to solve that problem. Via social media, I have connected with a lot of these independent, intelligent folks who, bless ‘em (and pray for ‘em and subscribe to their Substacks and all that good stuff), are taking to time to do this work. But bad elites is bad for the country.
The CDC messes up with COVID data again... and what bigger lessons can we draw from that?
Those who chose to disregard the CDC at every point are better off today. We didn't stay home, didn't wear masks, didn't get the !vax, didn't "social distance, " did continue to worship God, and /did/ take alternative treatments. I personally don't believe that the medical elite are simply idiots. For such a perfect record of error, there must be intentional deception and/or malice.
"We need better elites." Yes, we do, but by placing diversity ahead of merit, in terms of hiring, this will not happen any time soon. Competent people will be dismissed, based on sex or ethnicity.
What leads me to believe that we are dealing with malevolence, not incompetence, is the worldwide nature of this drama. Also, why insist that mRNA be injected into every arm under threat of loss of freedom of movement, employment, and educational opportunities? Why were early treatments denied? I watched Sen Ron Johnson's January panel discussion with dissident scientists and doctors. In it, Dr. Paul Malick told how his hospital expressly forbade him from from prescribing Vitamin D (!!!) to his covid patients. This panel discussion is well worth viewing.