Dr. Leana Wen, a well-known medical commentator for the Washington Post and CNN, wants us to believe that society has overcounted Covid deaths and hospitalizations. She first made this claim in the Post (1/13/23), and again during an appearance on CNN (1/17/23).
In the Post, she suggested that the US Covid death toll might be “30% of what’s currently reported”—that is, about 120 a day rather than 400—though she immediately added, “that’s still unacceptably high.” She maintained that a downward revision of the Covid toll “could help people better gauge the risks of traveling, indoor dining and activities they have yet to resume.”
After a flurry of angry responses (Washington Post, 1/19/23) from readers, experts and other journalists—including MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan (MSNBC, 1/19/23)—Wen (1/19/23) followed up, saying she took critics’ comments to heart, but insisted that society must acknowledge “that data changed over time and that deaths due to the pandemic are not necessarily the same as deaths due to Covid,” as if these thing weren’t related.
How did Wen—a medical doctor, a professor of health policy at George Washington University and the former health commissioner of Baltimore—come to this conclusion? She asserted this bold position after speaking with two doctors.
Determining cause of death
Wen’s citing “someone who had a heart attack” as an example of someone whose Covid infection “has no bearing on why they sought medical care” is peculiar, given the clear link between Covid and heart disease (CNBC, 10/25/22).
One is Dr. Robin Dretler of Emory Decatur Hospital, who “sees patients with multiple concurrent infections.” “If these patients die,” Wen wrote, “Covid might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses,” even though the “coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all.” Wen elaborated:
A gunshot victim or someone who had a heart attack, for example, could test positive for the virus, but the infection has no bearing on why they sought medical care.
That’s not how cause of death is determined, though, as Dr. Joyce deJong, who has served as a medical examiner throughout Michigan, explained to CNN (1/17/23). People often die with numerous medical conditions—”hypertension and diabetes, and name your list of diseases that are potentially lethal”—and it’s the job of medical examiners to pick out the underlying cause of death.
“For those of us who certify deaths routinely, [classifying Covid-19 deaths] is not necessarily much harder,” she said. “Maybe you’re missing some and maybe you’re overcounting some, but probably the bulk of them are accurate.”
“Cause of death is imperfect in every case,” Justin Feldman, an epidemiologist who’s a visiting scientist at Harvard’s FXB Center, told FAIR. “There will be non-Covid deaths that are attributed to Covid and Covid deaths not attributed to Covid,” he noted, adding that the latter is much more typical than the former.
“These are based on death certificates, and the idea that someone is going to die in a car crash and then said to have died from Covid is not going to happen,” said Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University.
As Dr. Lakshmi Ganapathi, a specialist in infectious diseases at Boston Children’s Hospital, told FAIR, “If it were me filling out the death certificate on a child who died due to gunshot wounds who also tested PRC positive for Covid on admission screening, I am not putting Covid there as a contributing cause,” noting that doctors list the “primary cause and in a second section, the most likely other secondary causes.”
Dr. Dannie Ritchie, a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at Brown University, told FAIR that she believes that society has undercounted Covid deaths, noting that if a person is infected with Covid and then recovers, but then subsequently dies of a heart attack, one can’t rule out the possibility that Covid might have led to that death, given the link between Covid and blood clots (CNBC, 10/25/22).
Thin gruel
Wen’s other source is Dr. Shira Doron. Wen doesn’t say it, but Doron is a well-known contrarian regarding Covid health measures, opposing masking in schools (Washington Post, 3/29/22; Twitter, 8/15/22; WGBH, 11/9/22) and remote schooling during Covid surges (WBTS, 12/23/21). Doron even floated the “overcounting” hypothesis to NPR (9/16/22). Wen wrote of Doron:
After evaluating medical records of Covid patients, she and her colleagues found 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.
This is what an editor would normally call “thin gruel.” A medical analyst in mainstream media with this much expertise is expected to cut through the “some say” vox populi reactions of quick-turnaround reporting that is all too common on newspaper pages, and instead pull knowledge from the published science and translate it for the rest of us.
It’s bad enough that Wen would offer a reassurance that Covid is not as bad as we think based solely on two interviews. But these physicians are offering speculation. A Covid patient was probably in the hospital for something else. Covid might get added as a cause of death. A diligent editor would certainly ask for more evidence.
Contradictory data
Wen runs up against a body of research that makes the opposite case. The Lancet (3/10/22) said that while total Covid deaths in 2020 and 2021 “totaled 5.94 million worldwide, we estimate that 18.2 million…people died” during the pandemic over that period “as measured by excess mortality.” The Washington Post editorial board (3/13/22) took the findings seriously, noting that the death rate for Covid in the US “was 130.6 per 100,000 population, but the estimated excess-mortality rate was 179.3 per 100,000.”
This all came after Nature (1/18/22) reported that “records of excess mortality—a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur—show many more people…have died in the pandemic” than official data suggests. But the concept of excess mortality—a key measure of whether deaths are being undercounted—doesn’t come up at all in Wen’s piece.
Dr. Jeremy Faust (Inside Medicine, 1/16/23), an emergency room doctor in Boston, wrote that Wen’s column had “no evidence offered for a claim for which we have excellent contradictory data,” noting that if overcounting Covid deaths “were happening, what’s the first thing we’d see? More Covid deaths than all-cause excess deaths. Do we see that? Nope.”
The World Health Organization also said that governments have been undercounting Covid deaths (NPR, 5/5/22). Indeed, by the second half of 2022, the US was recording more than 7,000 excess deaths each week, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, while officially recording fewer than 3,000 Covid deaths per week on average.
Embraced by Covid deniers
New York Post (1/14/23): “Many readers on Twitter seemed frustrated with the piece, expressing that they believed the medical community had been [over]counting for years now and that Wen’s info comes too late.”
Gonsalves noted that while conservative forces have embraced Wen’s column, no one is citing research to validate her position:
There is nothing that I read that says Wen’s hypothesis is true. She’s been provided with the data and she keeps mentioning the idea that we are overcounting deaths in a way that doesn’t make sense…. She’s out there alone.
Despite Wen’s assurances that Covid must still be taken seriously despite her claims, her column and her CNN appearance were embraced by the Covid-denying right. Wen’s piece quickly became ammunition for right-wing media, many of which cater to Covid skepticism and outright denialism. A Fox News column reprinted by the New York Post (1/14/23) reported that Wen had “admitted” that Covid deaths are being overcounted, and cited complaints that this admission comes “two and a half years late.” The Hill’s show Rising (1/18/23) embraced Wen as “based”—a term adopted by the alt-right to describe edgy truth-tellers—and celebrated Wen as a “liberal” apostate who “completely flips” by offering an “admission that the US government grossly overstated the number of deaths caused by Covid-19.” Anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Twitter, 1/16/23) commented, “A year ago, this was a conspiracy theory that would get you censored….”
Wen, despite publishing in establishment outlets that right-wing Covid deniers normally disregard, has increasingly acted as a sort of fifth columnist for the medical fringe. As I previously wrote at FAIR.org (1/10/23), Wen was rightly criticized (Daily Beast, 2/25/22) for her downplaying the importance of masking. I also noted how Wen (Washington Post, 12/9/22) gave cover to right-wing critics of military vaccine mandates for the military.
As Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, told FAIR, “All she’s doing is reinforcing a right-wing talking point, contributing to confusion and ultimately contributing to a higher death toll from Covid.”
The mountains of research that suggest Covid deaths, contrary to Wen, are actually undercounted aren’t just a statement of how dangerous Covid is, but suggest how poverty, lack of adequate healthcare, drug use and disability have exacerbated this crisis (Brink, 5/13/22). These excessive death studies indict social inequality and a broken public health system as much as they do the virus itself.
An honest accounting
In a follow-up piece, Wen (Washington Post, 1/19/23) blames excess deaths on “Covid mitigation measures” and “community health resources…diverted to address the coronavirus.” But that doesn’t explain why excess deaths rise and fall in tandem with Covid cases (MSNBC, 1/19/23).
In Wen’s follow-up piece, she said a study like Doron’s, using the administration of a particular drug as a proxy for Covid as primary cause of death, “is more precise than the often-cited excess mortality data.” She doesn’t back up this claim with evidence, only asserting that it is “tempting to compare the current level of deaths to pre-pandemic mortality and attribute all additional deaths to Covid.”
Faust blew this excuse out of the water (Inside Medicine, 1/20/23):
An honest accounting is precisely what all-cause mortality is about. It takes out the subjectivity. The fact that Covid deaths rise and fall in lockstep with all-cause excess mortality and that for the most part, there have been fewer Covid deaths than excess deaths, argues strongly that Covid itself is driving these deaths. But the author could be correct. Semantically speaking, these may not be the same deaths. But with data like ours, the burden of proof is on the author. What is responsible for these deaths and what evidence is offered to support those explanations? The author offers nothing.
Wen has made a name for herself as a national media figure with lots of medical expertise who says that it is time to “return to normal” (Politico, 4/22/22). Her latest provocation was embraced by the Covid-denying right, to which Wen does not belong. She does, however, stand with the neoliberal forces who want to get workers back into offices, roll back investment in public health and end discussions of how the pandemic highlights the need for universal healthcare (Vox, 6/16/22).
“Leana Wen is one of many pundits who tell the powerful what they want to hear,” Feldman said. “The thing you do when you want to go ‘back to normal’ is to downplay the severity of the problem, and one of the ways to do that is to say there aren’t that many deaths.”
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If anyone asks a question, regarding covid deaths, they are immediately dismissed as a covid denier, So why would anyone ever have the courage to question the validity of the data that exists?
“they are immediately dismissed” by whom? The overwhelming majority of media coverage and political commentary on Covid-19 in the corporate media was, and is, on the side of ignoring the reality and of pretending it is much smaller a problem than it is. Your claim about people not having the “courage to question the validity” of good-quality data is itself untrue. As the article itself shows with numerous examples, the opposite it the case. Your position is squarely in the mainstream.
“The overwhelming majority of media coverage and political commentary on Covid-19 in the corporate media was, and is, on the side of ignoring the reality and of pretending it is much smaller a problem than it is.”
…Based on what data? Where is the data that qualifies+quantifies covid media coverage over the past two years such that you can make this claim? Additionally, who decides *objectively* how “big” a problem is, for one to even make a claim that the media didn’t properly cover it? And how do you objectively determine what the proper amount and tone of media coverage is relative to the size of a problem? You’re speaking your own perceptions like they’re universal fact.
“Your position is squarely in the mainstream.”
I’m going to challenge this statement based on the FACT that social media companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube specifically and deliberately censored those exact positions
Ed,
This article by FAIR is text-book: Wen makes an argument that specifically downplays COVID, which she has had a history of doing for over 2-1/2 years. The article in question is on/in CNN & the Washington Post.
The original commentor is saying folks “aren’t allowed to say such things in the Media”.
This claim is demonstrably bullshit because this woman has been making this claim in these relatively high-profile Media companies for many years.
Social Media companies may be censoring her, but they are not NEWS ORGANIZATIONS. Moving the goal posts doesn’t make your argument anything other than weak.
Meanwhile no one on the left wants to talk about vaccine-related deaths, no matter how much evidence there is.
Thank you!
Something is horribly wrong with our media.
I have a 4X vaccinated cousin that spent 9 weeks on a ventilator suffering all kinds of inexplicable complications, liver failure, tachycardia, autoimmune disease. She finally asked to have the plugs pulled and passed, luckily her family was allowed to be at her bedside for that untimely event.
I’m sorry to hear of your cousin’s death. But if vaccines are sometimes guilty of causing death, they save far more lives than they kill.
So it would be counterproductive for the media to report such cases unless they include a clear and convincing statement that your relative risk of dying from a vaccine is much less than your risk of dying from not getting vaccinated.
A vaccine would not be used if it increases the risk of dying or the risk of getting seriously ill.
There is overwhelming evidence that deaths caused by vaccines are much less than lives saved by vaccines. So, the net effect of vaccines is to reduce total deaths.
this is not really about “vaccines” but about an experimental genetic modification technology – mRNA injections – serums that are called “vaccines” but are not really the same as the others we have known for years. normal vaccines are grown in an egg, this is a new technology, never before used in humans. nobody has ever made a successful vaccine for the common cold, which can be caused by coronaviruses and any number of other viruses, such as rhinovirus etc., and they didn’t do it this time either. you took 3 injections, and you still got sick and you still got other people sick. ever feel like you’ve been lied to?
observer, Exactly. Trump & Co. put ALL their mega-Profit-eggs in 1 shiny new (unproven) basket: mRNA.
How anyone on the Left could trust Trump & Co when it comes to biology & vaccines…is beyond me.
Oh, Fauci..yeah, the guy put in by….hard-right Reagan–and kept by Trump (not fired). The guy who scoffed at questions re whether it was safe to fly on planes, repeatedly stated no need for silly masks (just wipe down all your cereal boxes etc), lied repeatedly re NIH having (if indirectly) funded Gain-of-Function research related to bats & coronaviruses in…Wuhan. Noting that Gain-of-Function research is a euphemism for “Bio-Weaponization” of pathogens.
And Fauci proclaimed with absolute certainty & authority that the mRNA vaccines would Prevent people from getting sick and Prevent them from vectoring SARS-CoV-2: both assertions = FALSE + likely LIES.
Then the FDA refuses to release any of their Pfizer vax approval data..until a FOIA lawsuit is filed & a judge orders them to. Then FDA says they’ll release the data in……75 years. (when All of us are long gone)
Clearly, nothing to hide there!
Why is FAIR not writing about That?? It didn’t get widespread publication of course, but Reuters & The Intercept & Fortune & Newsweek did have articles related to some of these crucial issues.
I’m on the left and I’ll tell you that while it’s likely some vaccines cause deaths, the deaths caused by vaccines are greatly outnumbered by the lives saved by vaccines.
People on the right causing people to avoid vaccines by emphasizing vaccine-related deaths are doing something that is murderously counterproductive.
If a vaccine causes more deaths than it saves, then it should be avoided. But I challenge BRCitizen to produce any properly documented case when this has happened.
accines save more lives than avoiding a
It is murderously immoral for people on the right to cause people to avoid vaccines by
“no one on the left wants to talk about vaccine-related deaths”: evidence please. You will need to supply links to good-quality, independent studies showing a substantial number of these deaths around the world, and also that leftist media has avoided the topic.
Your headline about a misleading headline is misleading.
It should read with an even hand. Something like “Actual Number of Deaths FROM COVID Uncertain”
https://youtube.com/shorts/Tw9Ci2PZKZg?feature=share
I agree, but your suggested headline wouldn’t be a FAIR headline.
Excellent article.
I was trained in demographic and health statistics and I think it’s correct to argue that excess mortality is the best available measure because it gives deaths directly caused by covid along with deaths indirectly caused by covid, which should be counted because without covid, these deaths would not have occurred.
Thank you for a rational comment amidst the right winger BS. Tune into Breaking Points and Saagar Eneti’s awful rant on this issue if you want to read an endless litany from covid-deniers puffing out their chests and righteously screeching about how right they were all along.
we were right all along, russ. all the effort made by society to control this thing was a waste. it needed to happen, some people needed to die and the thing needed to become a part of the world. there was nothing anyone could do about it. you took 3 injections. you wore your mask. you stayed home. you cheered for techno-totalitarian access control systems. but you still got sick, and you still infected others. sorry russ, but guess what? virus gonna virus.
How do you know ‘these deaths would not of occurred’ ? How do you know if someone went to the hospital with a broken arm that they didn’t get Covid at the hospital, then died? So there is a meaningful difference of being dead of Covid vs death with Covid. Lots of grey here that partisans of both sides don’t want to recognize and there is plenty of ‘stuff’ we still don’t fully understand.
Excellent point, Ameen. And how about all the excess deaths from suicide? Do we blame Covid for those? I.e, should ‘Covid’ be listed on the person’s death certificate? Do we count that as a Covid death?
Or all those folks who were terrified of going to the doctor for checkups etc that then led to far more deaths from heart attacks, cancers (allowed to mutate & spread), etc?
We can’t just lump them all into “Covid” deaths.
Any more than we would list “Stock Market Fall” as cause of death for those who commit suicide, or monetary stress etc leads to premature death.
this isn’t really “fair” – it’s pretty one-sided. you respected Leana Wen when she was on your team, talking about how unvaccinated should be banned from society… but now that she makes an observation the other side has been making for almost 3 years, she is just another pundit making provocations. It is certainly true that she tells the powerful what they want to hear. but this author clearly supports what the powerful used to want to hear, and not what they want to hear now. as far as I know it is not FAIR’s mission to support one side over another, but to challenge media bias, which – contrary to the opinion of other commenters here – was quite clearly on the side of the totalitarian and utterly failed mass lockdown, mask, injection and technological control policies imposed by the state worldwide for 2 years .
Amazing all the right-wing COVID deniers and bots that magically appear when the COVID pandemic is rationally discussed. Words and phrases such as “totalitarian”, “untested genetically modified mRNA”, “people who have died from taking vaccines”, “I worked at (insert office, hospital, car wash, etc. here) and know that COVID deaths were over-counted”, “I/my brother/aunt/next door neighbor grew a second head after being vaccinated”, and other such horse shit, is parroted endlessly.
As the article states, the mortality statistics are a strong indicator that COVID deaths were vastly under-counted; and WaPo Wen’s neo-liberal “return to normal” agenda is based on a rickety scaffolding of half-truths and outright falsehoods.
The mRNA “vaccines” didn’t work, Russ. You took 3 injections and still got sick, and still infected others. Ever feel like you’ve been lied to?
These two things can both be true:
– COVID deaths were likely undercounted overall over the last three years
– COVID deaths are currently likely an overcount
There is sound science backing up both of these statements, which can be confusing. Ari Paul does nothing to shed light on this, preferring instead to do a political hatchet job on a scientist that he disagrees with, out of a misguided sense that maximum COVID caution is the most left position to take.
The excess mortality stats are pretty convincing, especially at the global level. In the U.S. it’s not as clear, because a substantial number of deaths were “non-COVID excess deaths” that were the result of quarantine measures (delayed medical care being the top cause, but also including approximately 50,000 annual “deaths of despair” such as spikes in overdoses, homicides, vehicular deaths and alcohol-related deaths). Even accounting for those, however, it looks like actual COVID deaths have overall been undercounted.
However, with the decreased virulence of Omicron, the CDC still counts nearly all patients that die with a COVID diagnosis as “COVID” deaths, because if it can be considered a contributing or secondary cause of death, it counts. Car crashes and gunshots are not counted, obviously, but nearly everything else is. Compare this to influenza and you begin to see why many think this is an overcount. The difference between the two is that EVERY patient is screened for COVID, whereas only symptomatic (with respiratory viruses) are screened for Influenza. So, perhaps another way to think about it is that flu deaths are vastly undercounted.
Well said, Mark, on all counts.
Precious few are looking at this objectively..almost everyone has slotted into a ‘my home sports team side’ mentality.
It’s a super-complex, dynamic situation with no easy answers.
Might help, for ex, if the FDA had released their vax approval data immediately upon approval. Instead, it took a FOIA lawsuit & a judge to force FDA to finally start releasing the data..dribbling it out. FDA claimed they needed…get this.. 75 Years! to release their Pfizer vac approval data..which they reviewed & approved in approx 6~8 weeks. So they could analyze all that data for mass approval (giving a novel mRNA vax to Hundreds & Hundreds of Millions), but then needed 75 years to simply release it for public review??
If science isn’t fully transparent And readily reproducible, it’s just another religion.
Sadly, so many have given over their common & critical sense to this shiny new Mega-Corp-Govt religion.
Note that Pfizer has at least 22 P.R. firms on their payroll.
Wonder if that has any impact on narratives & messaging?
Mark I believe you accurately described (indeed nailed) all of the key summary points. FAIR is not necessarily fair and guess what? There are any number of people here that will believe anything that’s published – as long – as it’s not from the West, the US government or the MSM. Go figure, its almost knee jerk reactions. Critical analysis and skepticism should be at the heart of any sensible journalist or publication irrespective of the left, center or right views.
Haha! Trust the doctors! Trust the science! Unless they don’t agree with what we are trying to perpetuate! Then, write articles about their “false narrative”
John,
Trust the three doctors who cast doubt without evidence, or the vast majority of doctors who make recommendations with evidence to back them up.
If you think those 2 things are the same, you need help.
FAIR spent about 2 hours, I would gather, collecting opinions from multiple different sources, who had a multitude of reasons, mainly lack of supporting evidence, for saying Wen’s argument sucked.
But here you come to defend bad science!!! Science based on conjecture, not data!
“She does, however, stand with the neoliberal forces who want to get workers back into offices, roll back investment in public health and end discussions of how the pandemic highlights the need for universal healthcare.”
Are you getting all that from the fact that she claimed that deaths due to COVID-19 had been overcounted? I understand that a think tank does not have the same obligation to avoid editorializing as a newspaper, but from any objective point of view, it’s hard to conclude something like “wants workers back in offices,” “wants to reduce health investment” or “is opposed to universal healthcare,” from a statement on whether deaths from COVID-19 are being overcounted or undercounted—even an incorrect one. Is there other information on which you are basing this characterization?
I was hoping to read more about the Denmark study that allegedly corroborated the over counting claim. I was surprised this author did not mention the study.