The CDC drastically reduced its estimate for how significant the omicron variant of Covid-19 is in the United States on Tuesday, now saying that the new variant, originally discovered in South Africa, was only responsible for 22.5% of new cases in the week that ended Dec. 18, not the daunting 73.2% that it had originally estimated last week.
According to Fox News, Dr. Jerome Adams, the former surgeon general in the Trump Administration, explained that the revision was likely partly due to a responder bias caused by a testing quirk with omicron called “S gene dropout,” in which one of the three target genes is not detected. When that gene is not detected, it can be an immediate marker for omicron.
“A lot of people were seeing this S dropout on the tests even before they got the follow-up genetic testing, and so those samples were disproportionately more likely to be sent in for sequencing,” Dr. Adams told Fox News Digital.
This isn’t the first time the CDC has had to issue a correction for grossly overinflating the data. In August, the CDC initially reported 28,317 new cases in Florida but adjusted that number to 19,584 after being called out:
“Wrong again. The number of cases @CDCgov released for Florida today is incorrect,” it responded to a report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “They combined MULTIPLE days into one. We anticipate CDC will correct the record.”
But are we surprised? We’re practically dealing with a left-wing extension of the Democratic Party that would rather scare Americans into economic collapse than reassure us that the Omicron data just isn’t that scary.
The CDC has flip-flopped more than Fauci, hence the reason the American people have lost trust in the guidance put out by the organization. According to a poll conducted in May 2021, only 52% of Americans have a great deal of trust in the CDC. Other health agencies were even lower — only 37% of Americans said they had a lot of trust in the National Institutes of Health or the Food and Drug Administration.
Senator Rand Paul exposing Fauci of being involved in Gain Of Function research hasn’t helped either. Fauci allegedly lied to congress recently stating that he was not involved in the funding of Gain Of Function research, but later got caught when the National Institutes of Health stunningly admitted to funding gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at China’s Wuhan lab — despite Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly insisting to Congress that no such thing happened.
The admission from the NIH official directly contradicts Fauci’s testimony to Congress in May and July, when he denied the US had funded gain-of-function projects in Wuhan.
Social Media has also been quick to call out the never-ending stream of inaccurate data published by the CDC including the number of people who have been vaccinated in the United States. Most do not believe the number is as high as being reported out of Washington and have reported the discrepancies on Twitter.
