Topic: WorldNetDaily
Art Moore wrote in a Jan. 10 WorldNetDaily article:
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky acknowledged Monday the premise on which advocates of a pandemic response of "focused-protection" rather than universal restrictions have relied -- that the vast majority of deaths from COVID-19 are among people who already were seriously ill.
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities," she said Friday in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America.
"So really these are people who were unwell to begin with," Walensky said.The CDC chief's remarks drew considerable criticism on social media from people who thought she was minimizing the deaths of people who are critically ill.
However, her statement was spotlighted by epidemiologists who have been calling for "focus protection" of the vulnerable in light of the fact that age and underlying conditions are a significant risk factor, and the healthy have a minuscule risk.
Except that's not what she said. ABC edited out the fact that Walensky was summarizing a study of 1.2 million vaccinated people , in which severe COVID later occurred in .003 percent of patients, or 189 of them, and of those, 36 died; it's from that number that the 75 percent figure is pulled as having four or more comorbidities, for a total of 29.
Moore did something interesting: He stealth-edited his article to try and make it less wrong -- without noting that the article had been edited and even retaining the original timestamp -- but he still managed to get it wrong. He changed the headline from "CDC chief: 75% of COVID deaths in people already seriously ill" to "CDC chief: 75% of vaccinated people who die of COVID already seriously ill," which still isn't quite right; it's 75 percent of an extremely tiny number of people who caught severe COVID after vaccination who died with several preexisting omorbidities. Moore's rewritten article made the same factual error:
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky's remarks characterizing the health of vaccinated people who die from COVID-19 stirred controversy over the weekend.
"The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities," she said Friday in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America.
"So really these are people who were unwell to begin with," Walensky said.
Her reference was to a recent CDC study of vaccinated people, but a clip of her interview that left out that qualification was regarded by many on social media as an admission that the vast majority of deaths from COVID-19 are among people who already were seriously ill.
In fact, critics of the federal government's response to the pandemic pointed out more than one year ago that the data on the CDC website indicated that only 6% of all recorded COVID-19 deaths were from COVID alone, with 94% having an average of 2.6 comorbidities.
That last paragraph is one talking point WND likes to harp on -- but it ignores the fact that the vast majority of those people with comorbidities would likely still be alive if they hadn't caught COVID, meaning that COVID did, in fact, kill them. That attitude also devalues the lives of those people, and we thought WND was "pro-life."
If WND can't even get a basic correction right -- let alone disclose to readers the fact that the article in question was corrected -- it's no wonder that WND is in deep trouble.
