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CNN’s expert doctor slammed for admitting over 2 YEARS LATE that Covid deaths were overcounted

January 15, 2023 | | Print Article

It only took 2-1/2 years, but CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen has finally admitted that COVID deaths and hospitalizations are being overcounted.

“We are overcounting covid deaths and hospitalizations. That’s a problem,” she wrote in a new column published to The Washington Post last Friday.

“Two infectious-disease experts I spoke with believe that the number of deaths attributed to covid is far greater than the actual number of people dying from covid,” she added.

Really?

One of the two “experts,” Robin Dretler, an attending physician at Emory Decatur Hospital and the former president of Georgia’s chapter of Infectious Diseases Society of America, estimated that 90 percent of the ostensible COVID patients at his hospital checked in for something entirely different.

The other “expert,” Shira Doron, discovered “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,” Wen noted.

While Wen’s admission of the truth is obviously a good thing, critics resent the fact that it took her so long to realize what others had already suspected years ago.

“‘We are overcounting covid deaths and hospitalizations. That’s a problem.’ People saying this a year ago were booted off social media,” Australian journalist Adam Creighton tweeted.

“Well, yeah … You’d think seeing this in legacy media would offer a feeling of vindication or resolution for those of us who have been screaming about it since 2020, but really it’s just exasperation, anger, & grief. The lies caused so much harm,” author A.J. Kay added.

See more responses below:

“This is not just recently true. It’s been true for three years! We truly do not know how many actually died from Covid, which means that not even the CFR is accurate,” Brownstone Institute president Jeffrey A. Tucker likewise tweeted.

For years, anyone who suggested that COVID hospitalizations and deaths were being overcounted was labeled a conspiracy theory and disinformation artist. What changed? That, unfortunately, still remains unclear.

All this said, Wen did push back on the separate theory that COVID hospitalizations and deaths were purposefully overcounted.

“Dretler is quick to add that the imprecise reporting is not because of bad intent. There is no truth to the conspiracy theory that hospitals are trying to exaggerate coronavirus numbers for some nefarious purpose. But, he said, ‘inadvertently overstating risk can make the anxious more anxious and the skeptical more skeptical,'” she wrote.

This separate theory gained prominence in August of 2020, when then-U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield testified that there was a “perverse incentive” for hospitals to overcount their coronavirus deaths by falsely attributing unrelated deaths to the virus.

“[W]e’ve seen this in other disease processes too, really in the HIV epidemic, somebody may have a heart attack, but also have HIV — the hospital would prefer the [classification] for HIV because there’s greater reimbursement,” Redfield he said.

Similarly, because of the CARES Act passed by Congress in March of that year, hospitals received a 20 percent premium when seeking payment for Medicare patients who’d died allegedly of the coronavirus.

“So I do think there’s some reality to that. When it comes to death reporting, though, ultimately, it’s how the physician defines it in the death certificate and … we review all of those death certificates,” the CDC director continued.

One of the first individuals to voice the theory was Dr. Scott Jensen, MD. In an interview back in April 2020, he revealed he’d received a disturbing guidance from the CDC’s own National Vital Statistics System urging him to misclassify unrelated deaths.

“Last Friday I received a 7-page document that told me if I had an 86-year-old patient that had pneumonia but was never tested for COVID-19, but some time after she came down with pneumonia we learned that she had been exposed to her son who had no symptoms but later on was identified with COVID-19, then it would be appropriate to diagnose on the death certificate COVID-19,” he said at the time.

Following that bombshell interview, he began regularly appearing on Fox News and warning that both the NVSS’s recommendation and the already inherent “perverse incentive” were creating a situation where the number of coronavirus deaths nationwide were likely being overcounted.

Vivek Saxena
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