The publication has long defended the official death toll estimates from the pandemic, even claiming they were low.
The New York Times acknowledged on Monday, citing data from the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, that about a third of US deaths associated with COVID-19 were actually brought on by another factor.
The Times article stated that both CDC data and a study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases support the claim that “almost one third of official recent COVID deaths have fallen into this category,” adding that “the official number [of COVID-19 deaths] is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had [the] virus at the time of death even though it was not the underlying cause of death.”
It asserts that all-cause mortality in the US has reached its pre-pandemic baseline and is titled “A positive COVID milestone.” According to the outlet, all-cause mortality was approximately 30% higher than normal during the worst of the pandemic. This statistic is less alarming when coupled with the admission that COVID deaths were initially overcounted by roughly 30%.
The admission goes against the Times’ and other well-known US news organisations’, fact-checkers’, and chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci’s years of insistence that any doubting of the official death toll was merely “conspiracy theory” spawned by erroneous rumours on social media and disinformation-spewing right-wing pundits.
When then-president Donald Trump asserted that the number of pandemic deaths was “lower than” the official total in 2020, The Times pounced, asserting “most statisticians and public health experts say he is wrong” and contending the number was in reality “far higher” than recorded.
The idea that the death toll was being exaggerated, in particular, offended Fauci, who told NBC in 2020 that “there is absolutely no evidence that that’s the case at all.” In the meantime, it was discovered that additional unrelated deaths, including those from gunshots and motorcycle accidents, had been added to the total.
Even though it had urged physicians to identify COVID-19 as the cause of death in some cases even when the patient had not been tested with the virus, the CDC even opined at the time that the figure was an underestimate of the actual number.
In 2021, Italy revised its own COVID-19 fatality statistics, which showed that just 2.9% of pandemic deaths could be directly attributed to the virus. The remaining patients typically had multiple chronic diseases, though fact-checkers were quick to refute any assertions that these comorbidities, rather than the virus, were to blame for the patients’ deaths.
Leana Wen, a Washington Post columnist and outspoken proponent of lockdowns, acknowledged in January that the “medical community” had “overcounted COVID deaths and hospitalisations.” She cited two infectious disease specialists who had informed her that the numbers for hospitalised COVID-19 patients had been exaggerated by as much as 90%.
