The Washington Post (1/13/23) is feeding denialist fantasies about Covid. That’s a problem.
Dr. Leana Wen, a well-known medical commentator for the Washington Post and CNN, wants us to believe that society has overcounted Covid deaths and hospitalizations. She first made this claim in the Post (1/13/23), and again during an appearance on CNN (1/17/23).
In the Post, she suggested that the US Covid death toll might be “30% of what’s currently reported”—that is, about 120 a day rather than 400—though she immediately added, “that’s still unacceptably high.” She maintained that a downward revision of the Covid toll “could help people better gauge the risks of traveling, indoor dining and activities they have yet to resume.”
After a flurry of angry responses (Washington Post, 1/19/23) from readers, experts and other journalists—including MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan (MSNBC, 1/19/23)—Wen (1/19/23) followed up, saying she took critics’ comments to heart, but insisted that society must acknowledge “that data changed over time and that deaths due to the pandemic are not necessarily the same as deaths due to Covid,” as if these thing weren’t related.
How did Wen—a medical doctor, a professor of health policy at George Washington University and the former health commissioner of Baltimore—come to this conclusion? She asserted this bold position after speaking with two doctors.
Determining cause of death
Wen’s citing “someone who had a heart attack” as an example of someone whose Covid infection “has no bearing on why they sought medical care” is peculiar, given the clear link between Covid and heart disease (CNBC, 10/25/22).
One is Dr. Robin Dretler of Emory Decatur Hospital, who “sees patients with multiple concurrent infections.” “If these patients die,” Wen wrote, “Covid might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses,” even though the “coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all.” Wen elaborated:
A gunshot victim or someone who had a heart attack, for example, could test positive for the virus, but the infection has no bearing on why they sought medical care.
That’s not how cause of death is determined, though, as Dr. Joyce deJong, who has served as a medical examiner throughout Michigan, explained to CNN (1/17/23). People often die with numerous medical conditions—”hypertension and diabetes, and name your list of diseases that are potentially lethal”—and it’s the job of medical examiners to pick out the underlying cause of death.
“For those of us who certify deaths routinely, [classifying Covid-19 deaths] is not necessarily much harder,” she said. “Maybe you’re missing some and maybe you’re overcounting some, but probably the bulk of them are accurate.”
“Cause of death is imperfect in every case,” Justin Feldman, an epidemiologist who’s a visiting scientist at Harvard’s FXB Center, told FAIR. “There will be non-Covid deaths that are attributed to Covid and Covid deaths not attributed to Covid,” he noted, adding that the latter is much more typical than the former.
“These are based on death certificates, and the idea that someone is going to die in a car crash and then said to have died from Covid is not going to happen,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University.
As Dr. Lakshmi Ganapathi, a specialist in infectious diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital, told FAIR, “If it were me filling out the death certificate on a child who died due to gunshot wounds who also tested PRC positive for Covid on admission screening, I am not putting Covid there as a contributing cause,” noting that doctors list the “primary cause and in a second section, the most likely other secondary causes.”
Dr. Dannie Ritchie, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Brown University, told FAIR that she believes that society has undercounted Covid deaths, noting that if a person is infected with Covid and then recovers, but then subsequently dies of a heart attack, one can’t rule out the possibility that Covid might have led to that death, given the link between Covid and blood clots (CNBC, 10/25/22).
Thin gruel
NPR (9/16/22) used Doran to advance the claim that Covid is “now less risky than flu.”
Wen’s other source is Dr. Shira Doron. Wen doesn’t say it, but Doron is a well-known contrarian regarding Covid health measures, opposing masking in schools (Washington Post, 3/29/22; Twitter, 8/15/22; WGBH, 11/9/22) and remote schooling during Covid surges (WBTS, 12/23/21). Doron even floated the “overcounting” hypothesis to NPR (9/16/22). Wen wrote of Doron:
After evaluating medical records of Covid patients, she and her colleagues found that use of the steroid dexamethasone, a standard treatment for Covid patients with low oxygen levels, was a good proxy measure for hospitalizations due to the coronavirus. If someone who tested positive didn’t receive dexamethasone during their inpatient stay, they were probably in the hospital for a different cause.
This is what an editor would normally call “thin gruel.” A medical analyst in mainstream media with this much expertise is expected to cut through the “some say” vox populi reactions of quick-turnaround reporting that is all too common on newspaper pages, and instead pull knowledge from the published science and translate it for the rest of us.
It’s bad enough that Wen would offer a reassurance that Covid is not as bad as we think based solely on two interviews. But these physicians are offering speculation. A Covid patient was probably in the hospital for something else. Covid might get added as a cause of death. A diligent editor would certainly ask for more evidence.
Contradictory data
Scientific studies (Nature, 1/18/22) show the opposite result from Wen’s “don’t worry” reporting.
Wen runs up against a body of research that makes the opposite case. The Lancet (3/10/22) said that while total Covid deaths in 2020 and 2021 “totaled 5.94 million worldwide, we estimate that 18.2 million…people died” during the pandemic over that period “as measured by excess mortality.” The Washington Post editorial board (3/13/22) took the findings seriously, noting that the death rate for Covid in the US “was 130.6 per 100,000 population, but the estimated excess-mortality rate was 179.3 per 100,000.”
This all came after Nature (1/18/22) reported that “records of excess mortality—a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur—show many more people…have died in the pandemic” than official data suggests. But the concept of excess mortality—a key measure of whether deaths are being undercounted—doesn’t come up at all in Wen’s piece.
Dr. Jeremy Faust (Inside Medicine, 1/16/23), an emergency room doctor in Boston, wrote that Wen’s column had “no evidence offered for a claim for which we have excellent contradictory data,” noting that if overcounting Covid deaths “were happening, what’s the first thing we’d see? More Covid deaths than all-cause excess deaths. Do we see that? Nope.”
The World Health Organization also said that governments have been undercounting Covid deaths (NPR, 5/5/22). Indeed, by the second half of 2022, the US was recording more than 7,000 excess deaths each week, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, while officially recording fewer than 3,000 Covid deaths per week on average.
Embraced by Covid deniers
New York Post (1/14/23): “Many readers on Twitter seemed frustrated with the piece, expressing that they believed the medical community had been [over]counting for years now and that Wen’s info comes too late.”
There is nothing that I read that says Wen’s hypothesis is true. She’s been provided with the data and she keeps mentioning the idea that we are overcounting deaths in a way that doesn’t make sense…. She’s out there alone.
Despite Wen’s assurances that Covid must still be taken seriously despite her claims, her column and her CNN appearance were embraced by the Covid-denying right. Wen’s piece quickly became ammunition for right-wing media, many of which cater to Covid skepticism and outright denialism. A Fox News column reprinted by the New York Post (1/14/23) reported that Wen had “admitted” that Covid deaths are being overcounted, and cited complaints that this admission comes “two and a half years late.” The Hill’s show Rising (1/18/23) embraced Wen as “based”—a term adopted by the alt-right to describe edgy truth-tellers—and celebrated Wen as a “liberal” apostate who “completely flips” by offering an “admission that the US government grossly overstated the number of deaths caused by Covid-19.” Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Twitter, 1/16/23) commented, “A year ago, this was a conspiracy theory that would get you censored….”
Wen, despite publishing in establishment outlets that right-wing Covid deniers normally disregard, has increasingly acted as a sort of fifth columnist for the medical fringe. As I previously wrote at FAIR.org (1/10/23), Wen was rightly criticized (Daily Beast, 2/25/22) for her downplaying the importance of masking. I also noted how Wen (Washington Post, 12/9/22) gave cover to right-wing critics of military vaccine mandates for the military.
As Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, told FAIR, “All she’s doing is reinforcing a right-wing talking point, contributing to confusion and ultimately contributing to a higher death toll from Covid.”
The mountains of research that suggest Covid deaths, contrary to Wen, are actually undercounted aren’t just a statement of how dangerous Covid is, but suggest how poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, drug use and disability have exacerbated this crisis (Brink, 5/13/22). These excessive death studies indict social inequality and a broken public health system as much as they do the virus itself.
An honest accounting
In a follow-up piece, Wen (Washington Post, 1/19/23) blames excess deaths on “Covid mitigation measures” and “community health resources…diverted to address the coronavirus.” But that doesn’t explain why excess deaths rise and fall in tandem with Covid cases (MSNBC, 1/19/23).
In Wen’s follow-up piece, she said a study like Doron’s, using the administration of a particular drug as a proxy for Covid as primary cause of death, “is more precise than the often-cited excess mortality data.” She doesn’t back up this claim with evidence, only asserting that it is “tempting to compare the current level of deaths to pre-pandemic mortality and attribute all additional deaths to Covid.”
Faust blew this excuse out of the water (Inside Medicine, 1/20/23):
An honest accounting is precisely what all-cause mortality is about. It takes out the subjectivity. The fact that Covid deaths rise and fall in lockstep with all-cause excess mortality and that for the most part, there have been fewer Covid deaths than excess deaths, argues strongly that Covid itself is driving these deaths. But the author could be correct. Semantically speaking, these may not be the same deaths. But with data like ours, the burden of proof is on the author. What is responsible for these deaths and what evidence is offered to support those explanations? The author offers nothing.
Wen has made a name for herself as a national media figure with lots of medical expertise who says that it is time to “return to normal” (Politico, 4/22/22). Her latest provocation was embraced by Covid-denying right, to which Wen does not belong. She does, however, stand with the neoliberal forces who want to get workers back into offices, roll back investment in public health and end discussions of how the pandemic highlights the need for universal healthcare (Vox, 6/16/22).
“Leana Wen is one of many pundits who tell the powerful what they want to hear,” Feldman said. “The thing you do when you want to go ‘back to normal’ is to downplay the severity of the problem, and one of the ways to do that is to say there aren’t that many deaths.”
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The post WaPo Feeds Denial With False Claims About Overcounting Covid Deaths appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Ari Paul.
Ari Paul | Radio Free (2023-01-20T22:17:52+00:00) WaPo Feeds Denial With False Claims About Overcounting Covid Deaths. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2023/01/20/wapo-feeds-denial-with-false-claims-about-overcounting-covid-deaths/
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