The draconian COVID policies handed down from unelected bureaucrats in Washington, DC had serious consequences for the American people. From lockdowns that destroyed small businesses and kept children out of school to nonsensical mask and vaccine mandates, these policies were not about “the science.” They were about power.
That’s why I introduced legislation this week with Senator Rubio called The Restore Public Health Institution Trust Act, which will open an investigation into the CDC’s messaging on unscientific mask and vaccine mandates. The CDC has yet to justify these decisions with clinical data and repeatedly claimed that COVID has caused widespread pediatric deaths, which was used as a cudgel to push COVID policies on our children.
The CDC is now facing questions about how they collected this data. But instead of answering these concerns, the CDC is doubling down even after credible publications like the British Journal of Medicine called out the flawed method CDC used for tracking COVID deaths. The CDC Data Tracker is based on the surveillance data, which meant that any hospital patient with a positive COVID result would create a case report—even a patient who died of head trauma, for example.
The Data Tracker, when compared to the CDC’s death certificate data, is overstating pediatric deaths by over 40%. For school-aged children (in the 5–11-year-old age group), the difference in overreporting for COVID deaths is even worse – 90%. That’s unacceptable. This flawed data was used to justify a ludicrous recommendation that children wear masks in our schools, which did untold harm to our children’s social development and psyche.
The CDC is betting that the American people will simply forget about their unscientific mandates, but I promise you we won’t. We need the actual clinical evidence that justified these decisions, and I won’t stop until the CDC gives us answers. This bill requires the CDC to provide those answers to the American people.
