![]() This is non-sensical and extremely misleading. Notice that Covid is listed both as the 4th AND the 6th leading cause of death. That means Covid is inexplicably ranked twice for each age group.īelow is the table ranking leading causes of death for 15-19 year olds. However, the rankings of Covid deaths by age group in the pre-print include both cumulative ( over 26 months) AND annualized deaths for some strange reason. The underlying cause of death data is for a single year – 2019 (more on that later). The second major issue with the pre-print are the time periods for the deaths. Faust posted a follow-up blog post where he admitted it was wrong to compare multiple CoD data with underlying CoD data. This is basically the same error that I addressed recently with Jeremy Faust’s blog post comparing pediatric deaths from Covid and the flu. This significantly overcounts Covid deaths compared to the other causes of death listed. The WONDER data they used is specifically Underlying Cause of Death data. This is a major problem, because the pre-print adds Covid to a ranking of the top underlying causes of death from 2019 from CDC WONDER. According to CDC WONDER, underlying deaths from Covid for this age group and time period actually totaled 1,088 deaths. It also states “In children and young people (CYP) aged 0-19 years, data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) indicate there were 1,433 deaths for which Covid-19 was the underlying cause of death (March 1, 2020-April 30, 2022).” However, this includes deaths where Covid was NOT, in fact, the underlying cause of death. The pre-print states “we only consider Covid-19 as an underlying (and not contributing) cause of death” but this is false. The NCHS data includes both, which overcounts Covid deaths because it includes death that had a different underlying cause. Death certificates include a single underlying cause of death, along with potentially several contributing causes of death. This source includes deaths where Covid is listed anywhere on the death certificate, not just the underlying cause of death. The first major issue I noticed was that they downloaded Covid numbers from NCHS. The two major errors are of such consequence that I believe this study should be fully retracted. ![]() There are two major errors with this data, along with some other problems, so I’ll go through them individually. I posted a quick Twitter thread to review of the revised pre-print. The rankings are now for every age group, but the authors did some other questionable things to exaggerate Covid deaths in children, including changing the time period for the Covid deaths to the worst 12 month period in the pandemic. UPDATE: A revised pre-print taking into account my critique was posted on June 28. He later posted on Twitter to say than an updated pre-print would be available soon. Flaxman, who originally said he’d get back to me on Monday, but responded early Sunday morning to get more information about the source of the Underlying Cause of Death data I used for Covid (the CDC WONDER database, Provisional Mortality Statistics, 2018-present). On Friday, June 17, I contacted the study’s corresponding author, Dr. ![]() It’s really disturbing that data this poor made its way into the meetings to discuss childhood Covid, and that it took me less that a few minutes to find a major flaw (and then I found many more as I looked deeper). And the slide makes additional errors on top of the pre-print. The pre-print it’s based on includes significant errors that invalidate the results. Only problem? It’s completely and utterly false. Katelyn Jetelina (“Your Local Epidemiologist”), and retweeted by many influential people including Jerome Adams, Julia Raifman (tweet now deleted), Gregg Gonsalves, and Leana Wen. I later learned that a very similar slide was also presented at the beginning of the FDA VRBPAC meeting earlier in the week, as were other slides citing this “top 5 cause of death” claim. Deepti Gurdasani, who is well-known on Twitter for her strong views on Covid. The source was a pre-print written by a group of academics from the UK, including Dr. In the CDC ACIP meeting on June 17 to discuss childhood Covid vaccines, a table was presented showing Covid was a leading cause of death in US children as part of a slide deck on the epidemiology of Covid-19 in children and adolescents by Dr. This article (and future ones) are available at my Substack – “Check Your Work”
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