U.S. Ends Daily COVID-19 Death Reporting

Jan. 16, 2022 (EIRNS)—According to guidance published on January 6, U.S. hospitals will no longer be required to report daily COVID deaths to the federal government as part of their general reporting as of Feb. 2. On the same day that the Department of Health and Human Services announced the changes to reporting requirements, none other than Dr. Ezekiel “EZ-Kill” Emanuel published an article in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) (with Dr. Michael Osterholm as a co-author), in which he states that the virus is here to stay:

“The goal for the ‘new normal’ with COVID-19 does not include eradication or elimination, e.g., the ‘zero COVID’ strategy. Neither COVID-19 vaccination nor infection appear to confer lifelong immunity. Current vaccines do not offer sterilizing immunity against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Infectious diseases cannot be eradicated when there is limited long-term immunity following infection or vaccination or nonhuman reservoirs of infection.”

China showed that a zero-COVID policy can be implemented, although barriers—ideological, logistical and cultural—have prevented such a policy from being widely carried out in the world.

Treating COVID-19 as just one among other diseases, Emanuel called for policymakers to “retire” such categories of data collection as “deaths from pneumonia and influenza or pneumonia, influenza, and COVID-19, and focus on a new category: the aggregate risk of all respiratory virus infections.”

Although COVID deaths will still be reported to the states, which pass that information on to the CDC, increasing numbers of states are moving to weekly, rather than daily reporting.

Many legacy “news” outlets liked to blame every U.S. COVID death on Trump personally. But now the Biden administration is eliminating this important and direct source of data, with the view that “COVID is here to stay.”

The goal of building a “comprehensive, digital, real-time, integrated data infrastructure for public health” could be a laudable one (in the context of a real effort to promote public health!), but continuing to count COVID-19 hospital admissions while not reporting deaths seems like an oddly specific change to promote. Why would that information be omitted from the “modern data infrastructure” that Emanuel calls for, which he said should include “real-time electronic collection of comprehensive information on respiratory viral infections, hospitalizations, deaths,” and so forth?

A real solution—which the article does not promote—is universal healthcare, and that on a global scale.

The Schiller Institute demands precisely that global approach!