Robert Malone on covid: what the evidence says · JRE #1757

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

CDC provisional mortality data show that most COVID-19 deaths involved additional health conditions listed on the death certificate: for about 6% of deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned, and for the rest CDC reported an average of 2.6 additional conditions or causes per death in its initial 2020 tables, a figure later fact-checks cite as roughly 94% of deaths involving other conditions. Malone's 95% and four-comorbidity figures are in the same range as CDC's reported data and are not fabricated. However, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org found this statistic does not support the implication, made here through Malone's causal-versus-association framing, that these deaths were merely coincidental rather than caused by COVID-19: CDC has separately reported that roughly 91-94% of death certificates mentioning COVID-19 listed it as the underlying cause of death, meaning COVID-19 was identified as the condition that started the fatal chain of events in the large majority of cases. Many conditions counted as comorbidities in CDC's tables, such as pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome, are themselves direct complications caused by COVID-19 rather than pre-existing conditions, so their presence does not show COVID was only associated with, rather than causal for, the death. The presence of comorbidities in most deaths is also typical of most causes of death in older or chronically ill populations and does not by itself establish that a death was misattributed to COVID-19. The underlying comorbidity-count figures are roughly consistent with CDC data, but this statistic is commonly used, including implicitly here, to suggest COVID deaths were overcounted or not truly caused by COVID, which runs counter to CDC's own analysis of the same death certificates showing COVID as the underlying cause in the large majority of cases.