Continuing its tradition of funky research in public health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published another study in April this year to sell the COVID vaccines for children. The study tried to show that unvaccinated children are more at risk from getting hospitalized due to COVID-19.
In a story full of questionable claims, the site Parents.com cited the CDC study to claim:
Unvaccinated children are most at risk for hospitalization (their odds tend to be at least twice that of vaccinated children.
The story linked to a post in Spectrum News NY1 that summarized the CDC study and repeated the claim made in the study: 87 percent of children aged 5 – 11 years hospitalized with COVID during the “Omicron surge period” in United States were unvaccinated.
As always, important weaknesses and shortcomings of the CDC study were left out of the media stories to serve the agenda of vaccine advocacy. A quick look at the study reveals multiple serious flaws that undermine the credibility of the CDC study published on April 22.
First and foremost, the CDC study in question is not objective and independent research because of serious conflict of interest involved. Not only is CDC federally funded by a government that is stakeholder in the COVID vaccine sales, but in this particular study more than one researcher involved were financially linked to the COVID vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, and Moderna.
The researcher Evan J. Anderson received funding of various kinds from Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, Sanofi-Pasteur, and other pharmaceuticals. The amount remains undisclosed but the competing interest statement claims the funding was not for this study – and one is supposed to take their word for it. Four other researchers in the study – Laurie M. Billing, Andy Weigel, Justin Henderson, and Andrea Price – reported receiving grants from the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE) “during the conduct of the study.” This implies the funding could be directly related to their work. The question is whether CSTE is linked to the COVID vaccine manufactures, and the answer is, yes.
While on its website, CSTE hasn’t highlighted its funding sources or corporate partners, its IRS form for 2019-2020 shows it has “established and expanded partnership” with Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson and Johnson, and multiple other businesses including Apple and Google.
Aside from this serious conflict of interest, the study has multiple shortcoming, or limitations, some of which are disclosed in the Discussion section (near the end of the report). The most notable “limitation” is the inclusion of partially vaccinated children among unvaccinated. In simple words, children who had been given one shot of the COVID vaccine were counted as unvaccinated, which is deceptive and fraudulent. CDC and the health departments have been known doing this for quite some time to swing the numbers in favor of the vaccinated and help sell vaccines.
Another serious weakness the study admits is the lack of certainly on why a child in question was hospitalized – for COVID or some other health problem. The study says:
Fourth, primary reason for admission was not always clear, and medical charts might not completely capture underlying conditions, potentially resulting in misclassification.
The study also admits that its findings represent just 10 percent of the US population and may not represent the rest of the country. In other words, it has no information on how 90 percent of the hospitalizations among children of this age group (vaccinated vs unvaccinated) did during the so-called Omicron surge.
These limitations are more than enough to step back from this study as any credible research. But to add some more doubt, the PCR tests used for detecting COVID infections are not credible and cannot tell variants. Their use for classifying COVID variant cases is unscientific.
The news outlets highlighting this study’s findings without looking at its weaknesses and lack of independence and objectivity are misleading people with an obvious agenda of convincing them to take their children to COVID shots.
