Chief COVID crazy finally admits we’re overcounting cases — but it’s years too late

Had she done less damage to our nation’s most vulnerable, it might be possible to applaud public health “expert” Dr. Leana Wen for her recent admission in The Washington Post and on CNN that the United States has been systematically overcounting the number of deaths from COVID by including deaths with COVID. The true toll of deaths and hospitalization, she notes, may be as little as 30% of the reported numbers. 

Horrifying? Yes. But more reason to fight back, tooth and nail, against any future effort to put kids and adults back in masks — as the feds are trying to do for air travel and as two of New Jersey’s largest school districts have done — or to lock down commerce and social life. 

Those policies, which had no significant measurable effect on bad outcomes, were always based on junk science. And Dr. Wen just admitted it for the world to hear. 

But her daring to speak this truth (obvious to any numerate person and long pointed out by The Post) comes years too late. Dr. Wen backed school closures and the CDC’s Orwellian “guidance” on indoor masking. She once infamously implied the right of unvaccinated people to go out in public should be restricted.

She — along with the WaPo and CNN — was part of the establishment that fought to suppress “misinformation,” i.e. correct but controversial statements about COVID, and brand all dissenters as conspiracy theorists. 

What prompted Dr. Wen’s “Road to Damascus” moment? Was it a desire to help out Joe Biden by making it politically acceptable for left-leaning Dems to (gasp!) start thinking about going back to normal? Or maybe WaPo and CNN audiences were so dialed in on COVID propaganda that this really does come as news to them? 

We may never know. But this much is obvious. Their demure admission now, when the damage is done, that oopsie, we got the central statistic used to justify the destruction of life in America completely wrong! is as reprehensible as it is insufficient.