US government moves to end daily COVID-19 death reporting by hospitals
The US federal government will no longer require hospitals to report the number of people who die from COVID-19 every day, according to new guidelines from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
On January 6, the HHS published updated guidelines on which information hospitals provide to the agency. The guidelines note the “retirement of fields which are no longer required to be reported,” among which is “Previous day’s COVID-19 deaths.”
The guidelines note, “This field has been made inactive for the federal data collection. Hospitals no longer need to report these data elements to the federal government.” This change goes into effect February 2.
The move by the Biden administration to weaken the reporting of COVID-19 deaths has direct precedents in the Trump administration. The House COVID Subcommittee’s 2021 year-end report said “Trump Administration officials purposefully weakened CDC’s coronavirus testing guidance in August 2020 to obscure how rapidly the virus was spreading across the country.”
Although the new HHS guidelines were issued on January 6, they were not made known until publicized by Dr. Jorge A. Caballero, a medical doctor and Clinical Instructor at Stanford university, on Twitter.
On Friday afternoon, Dr. Caballero wrote, “I’d love to understand why the federal government will no longer require hospitals to report the daily number of #COVID19 deaths as of February 2nd”
Caballero retweeted a response by this reporter noting that the same day the HHS published the updated guidance, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former Biden administration COVID-19 advisor and advocate of eugenics, published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) calling on governments to “retire” the reporting of deaths from COVID-19.
Emanuel’s call for a “new normal” was hailed with an editorial in the Washington Post and a lead interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, the most prominent of the US Sunday talk-shows.
Although hospitals will still report to state health authorities, and via the states to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), many states, led by Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, are themselves moving to shut down daily COVID-19 reporting, or have already done so.
The CDC has been in discussions with the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists about a directive that “would direct states to limit daily case reporting,” according to a report published December 30 in the New York Times.
States led by far-right Republicans are already slashing testing and reporting.
Tennessee, run by the far-right governor Bill Lee, who refused to recognize the election of US president Joe Biden, has already stopped daily case reporting, switching to a once-per-week system of reporting tests.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said last month that the state intended to “unwind” the “testing mentality.” Ladapo reports to DeSantis, a right-wing ideologue who also refused to acknowledge the outcome of the 2020 election.
Even more states plan to end daily reporting of cases, with many “that are still doing daily reporting eager to make the shift in the coming months,” Marcelle Layton, chief medical officer at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, told the Times.
After WSWS reporters verified that Caballero was correctly summarizing the HHS guidance, our report summarizing his findings was shared more than 6,000 times and viewed by more than two million people on Twitter.
Commenters responded with outrage. “The US government doesn’t want us to know how many of us are dying,” wrote Chris Richards, in a comment that received 1,500 likes. Thousands of commenters voiced their outrage that, after promising to “follow the science,” the Biden administration has taken an action that smacks of the Trump administration’s efforts to cover up the pandemic.
The day before, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki was asked, as “the virus is setting records for infection,” whether “things need to change.” Psaki replied, “We could certainly propose legislation to see if people support bunny rabbits and ice cream, but that wouldn’t be very rewarding for the American people,” prompting widespread outrage at the Biden administration’s indifference to mass death.
Responding to Caballero’s tweet, Sarah Lovenheim, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the US Department of Health And Human services, replied, “COVID mortality data remains publicly accessible. The data remains publicly accessible here and as there is new analysis, it becomes publicly available, too,” linking to data from the CDC compiled from state reporting.
To this, Dr. Caballero replied, “There’s no other source of daily in-hospital #COVID19 deaths at the state/national level. All other data sources are derivatives of *this* specific field. This field is *not* found in any other publicly available dataset. This field is used to estimate total COVID deaths + more.”
Responding to the claims by Dr. Caballero and the WSWS, Erin Kissane, a journalist at the Atlantic and co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project, which shut down on March 7 last year, replied “hospitals no longer reporting covid deaths to daily HHS doesn’t mean that all covid deaths don’t have to be reported to local/state health authorities, who report them to CDC. We’re still counting deaths.”
Likewise BNO Newsroom tweeted, “Contrary to some tweets, the U.S. is not ending daily reporting on deaths from COVID-19. Health departments will continue to provide updates as usual.” BNO confirmed to this journalist that it was replying to our tweet, but gave no further clarification in response to our inquiries.
Replying to these and other claims, Caballero wrote, “I, for one, care to have a secondary data source that can be used to double-check #COVID19 deaths reported by states with a 20-month track record of unscrupulous policies and questionable data management.”
Regardless of the claims by Kissane and BNO, the reporting by Caballero and the WSWS stands. On February 2, hospitals will no longer be required to report COVID-19 deaths directly to the federal government, and such data will depend on state governments that are themselves moving to shut down reporting.
There is no public health justification for the limiting of data reporting in the midst of a raging pandemic which is currently setting records for infections and hospitalizations. Just like under Trump, the efforts by the federal and state governments to limit reporting on COVID-19 is driven by a political effort to cover up mass infection and death.
Nolte: Biden’s Bungling Surged the Virus and Killed the Economy
His Fraudulency Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election based primarily on his promise to shut down the virus and not the economy. Well, here we are, one year into this presidency, and the exact opposite has happened.
As I write this, the coronavirus is surging to record levels. Meanwhile, the economy is stalling in ways that seemed impossible a year ago.
And all of this, every bit of it, is Joe Biden’s fault.
On the “shutting down the virus” front, Biden stupidly placed all of his eggs into the “vaccine” basket. For whatever lunatic reason, he believed America could vaccinate its way out of the pandemic. Honestly, on what planet did Biden think that was possible when the vaccine does not stop those who are vaccinated from spreading or catching the virus? All the vaccine does is reduce your symptoms. Sure, there’s no question the Trump Vaccine has saved lives and hospitalizations, but that still leaves us with a virus that can spread and infect.
Since the vaccine won’t do it, one way to slow the spread is to have rapid tests readily available to everyone. Well, Biden failed to order enough tests.
Oh, and with about 20 percent of the public unvaccinated, one way to reduce deaths and hospitalizations would be through the therapeutics that we know work. But thanks to Biden’s (and Fauci’s) mismanagement and desire to bully people into getting vaccinated by withholding education and availability of alternative treatments, we also have a shortage of those.
What’s more, Biden’s vaccine mandates have done more harm than good in the fight against the virus. Hospitalizations surged to record levels this week while unvaccinated health care workers were fired. This makes zero sense. What’s the rationale for mandates when the vaccine doesn’t stop the vaccinated from catching or transmitting the virus? There is no rationale, so the result of the mandate has been only to make the virus worse and hospitals more short-staffed than ever.
Worst of all has been Biden’s failure to communicate a consistent and rational message. Had Biden made clear that the vaccine would not stop transmission and prepared us for that, the ensuing surge of cases with the omicron variant would not have been so terrifying, which would have meant less damage to the economy.
Immediately upon taking office, Biden should have prepared the public for an endemic, a shift to learning how to live with the virus, which is primarily only a threat to unhealthy people who remain unvaccinated.
Instead, the omicron variant comes along, the media gin up the fear porn, as does vaccine-focused Biden, and here we are with an economy headed straight into the ditch. Record inflation, exploding gas prices, no jobs, bare grocery store shelves, school closings, a terrible retail season, and stalled out GDP growth…
It didn’t have to be this way.
As soon as the vaccine was available to all adults, all Biden had to do was mentally downshift the public into endemic mode. We are a dynamic people who can learn to live with a new normal. But instead, Biden and his media continued to try and terrorize everyone into getting vaccinated. The only result of that approach is an unnecessarily freaked-out public that stalled the economy into what will almost certainly turn into a recession.
Imagine an adequately managed virus, an America where we all have access to reliable at-home tests, where there are plenty of therapeutics available, where the scientifically useless but economically and psychologically destructive mask and vaccine mandates are no more, where the schools are open, where hospitals are fully staffed because no one is mandated out of a job, where everyone is educated on the risks and knows exactly where to get treatment when infected and what treatments are available to them… That’s where we should be right now, and there is no excuse for us not being there.
Think about it… In a matter of months, former President Donald Trump created a testing regime from nothing. In a matter of months, former president Trump got us a vaccine and had the economy on the rebound.
Biden entered office with a firm testing and vaccine foundation that could have quickly moved America to a safer, more educated, more normal, and healthier place. All he had to do was tell the truth, order enough tests, order enough therapeutics, and inform us that it was now time to carry on with normal life.
Instead, he became a Vaccine Tyrant, a fear monger, a megalomaniac so focused on vaccines and the fear he needed to sell them, he forgot or refused to order tests and therapeutics, downplayed the fact the vaccines would not shut down the virus, and refused to allow people to move on.
So here we sit, a year later, in a country where the virus is thriving, and the economy is stalled.
And it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
Tulsi Gabbard Blasts Joe Biden: ‘He Has Betrayed Us All’
President Joe Biden has “betrayed us all,” Tulsi Gabbard said on Friday, accusing the president of going back on his promise to unite the country.
Gabbard, who ran against Biden in the 2020 Democrat presidential primary, admitted that she supported him after dropping out of the race.
“I know Vice President Biden and his wife and am grateful to have called his son Beau, who also served in the National Guard, a friend,” Gabbard said in a statement at the time in March 2020.
“Although I may not agree with the Vice President on every issue, I know that he has a good heart and is motivated by his love for our country and the American people,” she added.
“I supported Joe Biden, and millions of other Americans voted for Joe Biden because he promised to unite us,” she said in the video Friday, speaking of his lofty promises to “bring us together [and to] to end the divisiveness.”
“Sadly, not only has he failed to do this, he has betrayed us all by pouring fuel on the fires of divisiveness that are tearing our country apart,” Gabbard said.
“Biden compares those who disagree with him to racist traitors, to enemies of bygone eras, and Biden now has his attorney general targeting millions of Americans as domestic terrorists,” she continued as her video cut to a clip of Matthew Olsen, Assistant Attorney General National Security Division talking about the U.S. facing an elevated threat from “domestic violent extremists, that is individuals in the United States who seek to commit violent criminal acts in furtherance of domestic social or political goals.”
“Domestic violent extremists are often motivated by ideologies and personal grievances. We’ve seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies,” he added.
“If we allow this to continue, our country, our country, the country that we love, the land of the free, the home of the brave, it will be unrecognizable, and it will be lost forever,” Gabbard warned:
Biden focused on the theme of unity upon taking office, mentioning it several times throughout his inaugural speech. However, he quickly shifted gears months down the road, most significantly during his divisive coronavirus speech in September 2021, where he warned that his patience was “wearing thin” with unvaccinated Americans
Nearly 4-in-10 Illegal Aliens Refusing Coronavirus Vaccine as Americans Hit with Mandates
While millions of American citizens are being hit with mandates to obtain one of three approved vaccines for the Chinese coronavirus, new data reveals that thousands of illegal aliens are refusing the vaccine.
This week, while striking down President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for every large business in the nation, the United States Supreme Court upheld a mandate that will require 17 million American healthcare workers to obtain the vaccine or risk firing.
Likewise, in a number of blue states like California, New York, and Illinois as well as giant corporations like McDonald’s and Goldman Sachs are requiring millions of Americans to obtain the vaccine to work, eat in restaurants, enter event venues, and other indoor spaces.
New data, published by CBS News, reveals that nearly 4-in-10 illegal aliens in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention are refusing the vaccine:
The 48,246 individuals who have received a coronavirus vaccine in detention also represent only one-third of 141,000 immigrants who have entered ICE custody after July 2021, when the agency received its first federal allocation of vaccines for detainees, according to an analysis of government data. [Emphasis added]
…
According to unpublished ICE records, 37.6% of immigrants who have been offered the vaccine by the agency have declined it. [Emphasis added]
At the same time, coronavirus infections have exploded in recent months inside ICE detention facilities. Since the start of the new year, detained illegal aliens with coronavirus have jumped 520 percent.
Today, nearly 1,800 illegal aliens are quarantined out of the roughly 22,000 illegal aliens who are detained by ICE.
While Biden and elected Democrats have continued to impose vaccine mandates on American citizens, they have routinely exempted illegal aliens from such requirements.
Last November, for instance, Biden announced that cross-border truckers would be mandated to be vaccinated in order to continue working. The order exempted border crossers and illegal aliens.
Months before, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee blocked legislation by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) that would have mandated all foreign nationals in the U.S. seeking to adjust their immigration status to be vaccinated.
Former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Mark Morgan, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has previously said that “few to none” of the border crossers and illegal aliens arriving at the southern border are vaccinated.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Shelter accounts for about a third of American household expenditure, and the cost of buying or renting shelter is up nearly 20% over the past year. Yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for shelter reported Jan. 12 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase of just 4.2 over the past year.
Ugly stuff on inflation rolling out: Thanks, Joe
As Ernest Hemingway once described it: Bankruptcy comes "gradually, then suddenly."
And sure enough, we have Joe Biden's inflation numbers, which certainly have been printing high, as anyone familiar with grocery store shelves can attest. That's reflected in the consumer price index, which clocked in at 7% last year.
But that's a mere warm-up act. The ugly one is the leading indicator for CPI, known as the producer price index (PPI) which rose a whopping 9.7% last year, showing a far worse picture than any White House flak could spin. Embedded in that news is that inflation may get higher.
Producer prices increased by nearly 10% for the year ending in December, the highest rate of growth since the Labor Department began keeping records.
The producer price index measures the average change over time in selling prices received by domestic producers of goods and services. The 9.7% increase is the highest increase since it first started being measured more than a decade ago.
Sure, the economists are trying to claim that the rise is moderating from months past. The White House characters in charge of this fiasco signal no familiarity with economics at all with this indicator, but here's a primer just what the PPI is, from Investopedia, emphasis mine:
Inflation is probably the second-most-watched indicator after unemployment data, as it helps investors deduce the future direction of monetary policy. The core PPI can serve multiple roles in improving investment-making decisions because it can serve as a leading indicator for CPI. When producers are faced with input inflation, those rising costs are passed along to the retailers and eventually to the consumer.
Furthermore, PPI presents the inflation picture from a different perspective than CPI. Although changes in consumer prices are important for consumers, tracking PPI allows one to determine the cause of the changes in CPI. If, for example, CPI increases at a much faster rate than PPI, such a situation could indicate that factors other than inflation may be causing retailers to increase their prices. However, if CPI and PPI increase in tandem, retailers may be simply attempting to maintain their operating margins.Economists can also forecast the future movement of the finished goods index by monitoring the intermediate index, and the direction of the intermediate index can be determined by analyzing the crude index. Essentially, the data obtained from monitoring the downhill indicators, those focused on raw materials, can be used to forecast the uphill core indicators. The PPI of finished goods provides a sense of the expected CPI movement.
Basically, PPI tells us what's in store for us in the pipeline as producers take in their raw materials from way down the supply chain and create their finished products. If their prices go up, the retailers' prices have to go up, because the retailers need to pay the higher prices from their suppliers and raise prices more, just to keep their heads above water. PPI is what's known as a leading indicator, and Investopedia notes that other than the Friday jobs reports, this one is watched more closely by investors than any other number.
And now we have it: 9.7%, which means, more price hikes are ahead as goods get to consumers - who are spending less as a result.
Here's the next nasty news: Respected economist David Goldman (Hat tip: Instapundit) notes that the government bean counters are undercounting inflation:
Shelter accounts for about a third of American household expenditure, and the cost of buying or renting shelter is up nearly 20% over the past year. Yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for shelter reported Jan. 12 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase of just 4.2 over the past year.
Private surveys conducted by the big rental sites, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com, show increases of 13% to 18% during 2021, and the Case-Shiller Index of US home prices jumped 18% in the year through October.
Who are you going to believe, to paraphrase Groucho Marx – the US government or your own eyes?
Part of the discrepancy involves a simple time lag. The US government looks at the present cost of housing while the private rental surveys register the cost of a new rental. It takes a while for leases to expire and new, higher-cost leases to take effect.
Changes in the Apartmentlist.com rent index predict changes in the CPI shelter index with lags up to eight months. That explains at least part of the divergence of the CPI rent inflation number from the private rental surveys.
This time, the CPI rent inflation rate of 4.2% undershot the private rental data. As old leases expire and new leases are written, the CPI index for shelter should rise by 14 percentage points. Shelter makes up 32.3% of the CPI, so 14 percentage points in the cost of shelter would add another 4.5 percentage points to the headline inflation number.
That’s an additional 4.5 percentage points on top of the 7% annual rate of CPI inflation. In other words, accurate accounting for real-world shelter costs would put consumer inflation in the US around 10% a year. And double-digit inflation would cause a market meltdown.
Goldman forecasts rate hikes coming bigger, longer and sooner with this kind of hot-fire inflation now in the pipeline.
We already see the impact of this inflation in falling retail sales (consumers have less to spend), unexpected, of course, and worker wages shriveling.
Issues & Insights has a stellar piece on Biden's inflation brought on by turning on the money presses to expand the size of government:
Inflation is not an equal-opportunity destroyer. It is a disease that hurts the middle class and the working poor the most.
A perfect example: the surge in energy prices, following Biden’s imposition of draconian curbs on fossil fuel to reverse climate change.
Biden has been effective: His policies to destroy the fossil fuel industry have led to soaring energy prices, with the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index energy gauge shooting up 59% last year. Things aren’t getting better. Since just before Christmas, when crude oil prices stood at about $66 a barrel on the New York Mercantile exchange, they’ve spurted to about $81 a barrel, a 23% gain in just a month.
Because energy makes up a far larger share of the household income of the poor, it amounts to a massive green tax on those least able to pay it. Just wait until heating bills come due in February.
Worse still, Biden’s inflation erodes the very income that the poor and minorities rely on to survive. It’s a cruel double whammy, perpetrated entirely by the so-called Party of the Poor.
(I bet my old colleague from my Investor's Business Daily editorial page, Terry Jones, wrote that. He's brilliant.)
The news that producer prices are rising, and inflation is here to stay is a nightmare. Monster government spending has left the U.S. with huge debt, a huge deficit in excess of 100% of GDP, and now more price hikes ahead for all of us. Biden doesn't seem to mind this sort of thing, given his solicitousness toward Jimmy Carter, but nobody expected him to try to top Carter's record, which, to be fair, was brought on by monster government spending from the previous administrations in the War on Poverty and the Vietnam War.
But you'd think Biden would have learned from history. He has that advantage that Carter didn't. But he hasn't. Inflation to him is a matter of "build back better." We've got three years of this trash ahead. The only thing to be done now is to block him from harming himself and the country as is rightly done with any senile old fool who doesn't know what he's doing.
Nolte: Biden’s Bungling Surged the Virus and Killed the Economy
His Fraudulency Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election based primarily on his promise to shut down the virus and not the economy. Well, here we are, one year into this presidency, and the exact opposite has happened.
As I write this, the coronavirus is surging to record levels. Meanwhile, the economy is stalling in ways that seemed impossible a year ago.
And all of this, every bit of it, is Joe Biden’s fault.
On the “shutting down the virus” front, Biden stupidly placed all of his eggs into the “vaccine” basket. For whatever lunatic reason, he believed America could vaccinate its way out of the pandemic. Honestly, on what planet did Biden think that was possible when the vaccine does not stop those who are vaccinated from spreading or catching the virus? All the vaccine does is reduce your symptoms. Sure, there’s no question the Trump Vaccine has saved lives and hospitalizations, but that still leaves us with a virus that can spread and infect.
Since the vaccine won’t do it, one way to slow the spread is to have rapid tests readily available to everyone. Well, Biden failed to order enough tests.
Oh, and with about 20 percent of the public unvaccinated, one way to reduce deaths and hospitalizations would be through the therapeutics that we know work. But thanks to Biden’s (and Fauci’s) mismanagement and desire to bully people into getting vaccinated by withholding education and availability of alternative treatments, we also have a shortage of those.
What’s more, Biden’s vaccine mandates have done more harm than good in the fight against the virus. Hospitalizations surged to record levels this week while unvaccinated health care workers were fired. This makes zero sense. What’s the rationale for mandates when the vaccine doesn’t stop the vaccinated from catching or transmitting the virus? There is no rationale, so the result of the mandate has been only to make the virus worse and hospitals more short-staffed than ever.
Worst of all has been Biden’s failure to communicate a consistent and rational message. Had Biden made clear that the vaccine would not stop transmission and prepared us for that, the ensuing surge of cases with the omicron variant would not have been so terrifying, which would have meant less damage to the economy.
Immediately upon taking office, Biden should have prepared the public for an endemic, a shift to learning how to live with the virus, which is primarily only a threat to unhealthy people who remain unvaccinated.
Instead, the omicron variant comes along, the media gin up the fear porn, as does vaccine-focused Biden, and here we are with an economy headed straight into the ditch. Record inflation, exploding gas prices, no jobs, bare grocery store shelves, school closings, a terrible retail season, and stalled out GDP growth…
It didn’t have to be this way.
As soon as the vaccine was available to all adults, all Biden had to do was mentally downshift the public into endemic mode. We are a dynamic people who can learn to live with a new normal. But instead, Biden and his media continued to try and terrorize everyone into getting vaccinated. The only result of that approach is an unnecessarily freaked-out public that stalled the economy into what will almost certainly turn into a recession.
Imagine an adequately managed virus, an America where we all have access to reliable at-home tests, where there are plenty of therapeutics available, where the scientifically useless but economically and psychologically destructive mask and vaccine mandates are no more, where the schools are open, where hospitals are fully staffed because no one is mandated out of a job, where everyone is educated on the risks and knows exactly where to get treatment when infected and what treatments are available to them… That’s where we should be right now, and there is no excuse for us not being there.
Think about it… In a matter of months, former President Donald Trump created a testing regime from nothing. In a matter of months, former president Trump got us a vaccine and had the economy on the rebound.
Biden entered office with a firm testing and vaccine foundation that could have quickly moved America to a safer, more educated, more normal, and healthier place. All he had to do was tell the truth, order enough tests, order enough therapeutics, and inform us that it was now time to carry on with normal life.
Instead, he became a Vaccine Tyrant, a fear monger, a megalomaniac so focused on vaccines and the fear he needed to sell them, he forgot or refused to order tests and therapeutics, downplayed the fact the vaccines would not shut down the virus, and refused to allow people to move on.
So here we sit, a year later, in a country where the virus is thriving, and the economy is stalled.
And it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
GDPNow Plummets Following Weak Consumer Spending Report
The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate of fourth-quarter economic growth plunged from Monday’s 6.9 percent to five percent on Friday following the release of worse than expected economic data from the Commerce Department and the Federal Reserve.
The decline was driven by a severe drop in the model’s estimate of Personal Consumption Expenditures. At the start of the week, these were estimated to have grown at a rate 3.14 percent. On Friday, this was downgraded to 1.4 percent.
GDPNow uses economic modeling to read what the most current economic data implies about economic growth. It is not a forecasting model but a real time assessment. The next update is scheduled for Wednesday, January 19th.
The Commerce Department reported that retail sales fell by 1.9 percent in December, far worse than expected and the second disappointing month. Adjusted for inflation, sales were likely down in November as well. The Federal Reserve said that industrial production also fell in December, with manufacturing output tumbling 0.3 percent.
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