CDC Admits to Scientific Fraud: Are Christians Making the Same Mistake?

Data released by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) show that the COVID-19 vaccine provided practically no “absolute risk” reduction for Americans below the age of 50.^[1] However, this was not the narrative the CDC was touting. Writing in the Federalist, David Gortler reminds us, “The official narrative was put forward most clearly by President Biden when he said, ‘If you’re out there unvaccinated, you don’t have to die…get the vaccine.’ This was followed by mass vaccine mandates, mask mandates, continued lockdowns, and rushed vaccination projects for children as young as five years old and even younger.”^[2] Countless healthy, young Americans were forced to choose between their job and a highly controversial, rushed, and experimental vaccine.

The President’s message of “you don’t have to die…get the vaccine” was touted as simply following the science, but it turns out that science was far from black and white. Instead, as CDC Director Rachel Walensky recently admitted, the science was quite grey, and it was infused with “too little caution and too much optimism.”^[3][4][5]

One of the reasons the science appeared to be so definitive is because the CDC chose to selectively withhold COVID-19 data that risked undermining the prevailing narrative. Several people familiar with the data told the New York Times, “Two full years into the [COVID-19] pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected.”^[6] Moreover, CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund confirmed that this is, in part, because the CDC feared the information might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.^[7] In other words, the CDC chose to withhold inconvenient data in order to protect a particular narrative.

“That rationale from the CDC hardly justifies the fact that the selective omission of public information is more than clinical malpractice; it is scientific fraud,” writes David Gortler at the Federalist.^[8] This is evident in recent, and first, significant data on the effectiveness of boosters published by the CDC. The data only runs through the end of December, when the exponentially less deadly Omicron surge was just beginning.^[9] Even so, the numbers reveal that vaccine mandates were never truly about protecting people from dying as, over the course of the first two years of the pandemic, only 0.9 per 100,000 unvaccinated people died of COVID-19. Granted, this number dropped to 0.03 among the vaccinated, and “with the addition of a booster, deaths were too low to measure,” but the difference in what scientists call “absolute risk” is negligible because the original risk was already exceptionally low.^[10]

Healthy citizens below the age of 50 have never been at high risk of dying from this disease. “COVID-19 largely multiplies existing risks faced by patients,” according to the Lancet,^[11] with an average of four comorbidities in 94% of COVID-19 deaths.^[12] Most importantly it is a highly age-discriminatory disease.

Clearly the need to protect Americans below the age of 50 was not so overwhelming as to justify forcing us to choose between our livelihoods and our medical autonomy. (Keep in mind that it was already known that the vaccines are ineffective at preventing the spread of COVID-19^[13] when President Biden announced his plan to mandate vaccines.)^[14] Of course, anyone who dared question the wisdom of the mandates, or the efficacy of the vaccine, was immediately censored, or even deplatformed. For good or for ill, the CDC determined it was in our best interest to protect us from any information that undermined the government’s preferred narrative on COVID-19.

When we look at the lives and businesses that were destroyed because the CDC’s decision to protect us from inconvenient facts, it is easy to become infuriated. However, before we are too quick to condemn the CDC, let us first examine ourselves. Could it be that we too have succumbed to the same temptation? And could it be that we too are propagating a narrative that is at least as devastating?

Have we chosen to preach our preferred gospel narrative rather than the whole truth of God’s Word? Are we selectively emphasizing the positive facts about God’s love, mercy, patience, and forgiveness while ignoring and downplaying the inconvenient facts about God’s judgment? Perhaps we simply find it easier to win people over to a positive and encouraging message that indiscriminately promises blessings than it is to win people over to a message that also involves holiness, justice, and judgment? Regardless, by “protecting” people from the inconvenient truth about God’s judgment, are we preparing people for a greater devastation than anything the CDC has perpetrated?

America is traversing a dangerous path that leads to national judgment. Consider just a few recent news items. During her confirmation hearing yesterday, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom President Biden nominated for the Supreme Court on the basis being a black woman, said she cannot define the word “woman.”^[15] Lia Thomas, a biological male who identifies as a woman, won a women’s NCAA swim championship last week.^[16] Earlier this month, Maryland’s House of Representatives voted 93-42 on an amendment that, if approved by the Senate, would establish Maryland as the first state to explicitly enshrine a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Moreover, Maryland’s proposed House Bill 626 and Senate Bill 669 would each effectively decriminalize infanticide by allowing babies to die by neglect, perhaps up to 28 days after birth.^[17][18]

As God’s representatives, are we talking about these matters? Given how much we’ve had to say about issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, illegal immigration, and the competency of our president, it is evident that we don’t have an aversion to discussing political matters. Why then are we reluctant to address moral matters in our country?

Although they may be wrapped in cultural politics, these are fundamentally moral matters that provoke God’s judgment if unaddressed. Indeed, God has judged mighty nations of the past for these very sins. If we choose to ignore or downplay the fact that God judges both individuals and nations for unrepentant sin because it is more attractive to emphasize God’s love, mercy, patience, and forgiveness, then we are no better than the CDC. Whereas the CDC may have committed scientific fraud, we will have committed religious fraud. In both cases, the results can be nothing less than disastrous for countless lives.

Occasionally, current events, like the way the CDC handled the COVID-19 data, can illustrate the foolishness of the very tactics we ourselves have adopted. Before we point our fingers at their mistakes, let us judge how we are handling the biblical data entrusted to us.