CDC guidance counted any death where COVID-19 appeared among causes and contributors as COVID-related, regardless of whether it was the primary cause. Hospitals received a 20% Medicare add-on payment for COVID patients, creating financial incentives for COVID coding. Dr. Deborah Birx admitted the US took a 'very liberal approach to mortality.' The distinction between dying WITH COVID vs. FROM COVID was dismissed as conspiracy theory until health officials themselves acknowledged the overcounting.
“There are other countries that if you had a pre-existing condition and COVID was the cause of death, it was counted as COVID death. The US took a very liberal approach to mortality.”
From “crazy” to confirmed
The Claim Is Made
This is the moment they called it crazy.
When hospitals began admitting COVID-19 patients in early 2020, a question emerged that would prove difficult to answer: how do you count a death caused by COVID versus a death that merely occurred in someone who had COVID? The distinction seemed straightforward enough in theory. In practice, it became one of the most contentious aspects of the pandemic response.
Early in the outbreak, some medical professionals and observers began asking whether the United States was conflating these two categories. They noted that the CDC's official guidance counted any death where COVID-19 appeared among the causes and contributing factors as a COVID death, regardless of whether the virus was the primary cause. A patient who died of a heart attack while testing positive for COVID, under this definition, would be recorded as a COVID death.
Critics raised another concern: hospitals received a 20% Medicare add-on payment for treating COVID patients. This financial incentive structure, they argued, created motivation to code diagnoses as COVID-related even when the virus played a secondary role. These claims were quickly labeled as conspiracy theories by mainstream media outlets and some health officials who suggested that anyone questioning death counts was promoting dangerous misinformation.
The official narrative held firm for months. Suggesting that COVID death tallies might be inflated was treated as heretical. Fact-checkers dismissed the financial incentive angle as scaremongering. The very premise that hospitals might have financial reasons to classify deaths one way or another was presented as absurd.
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Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Confirmed: They Were Right
The truth comes out. Officially documented.
Then the admissions began. In a December 2020 interview, Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, stated plainly that the United States had taken a "very liberal approach to mortality." She acknowledged that the counting methodology had captured deaths that might not have been primarily caused by COVID-19. This wasn't presented as new information—it was recognition that what skeptics had been saying all along had merit.
The CDC's own documentation confirmed the approach. Their guidance explicitly stated that COVID-19 should be recorded on death certificates for anyone who had a confirmed or probable case and died, even if the disease was not necessarily the underlying cause. The distinction between dying WITH COVID and dying FROM COVID, which had been dismissed as pedantic conspiracy thinking, suddenly became official acknowledgment of reality.
This wasn't a case where critics were entirely right and officials entirely wrong. The truth existed in the gray area—COVID deaths were both genuinely significant and also counted with a methodology that inflated numbers beyond what direct causation would suggest. The 20% Medicare payment did exist, creating a financial incentive structure that officials had initially denied or minimized.
What matters now is not pointing fingers but understanding what happened. A significant claim about how death statistics were compiled and how financial incentives might influence medical coding turned out to be substantially true, despite being aggressively dismissed. Officials eventually acknowledged the reality behind the criticism.
This pattern—initial dismissal of a claim as conspiracy theory, followed by quiet official acknowledgment—has consequences for public trust. When citizens notice something appears amiss and raise questions only to be told they're spreading misinformation, and then later learn those concerns had merit, they remember that lesson. Trust in institutions isn't rebuilt by hoping people forget what happened.
Beat the odds
This had a 0.2% chance of leaking — someone talked anyway.
Conspirators
~300Network
Secret kept
1.8 years
Time to 95% exposure
500+ years
