After Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came under fire in Congress Thursday over data on COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya told Newsmax the Biden administration “made the data corrupt in a way that’s hard to disentangle.”
Kennedy has voiced distrust of research that showed the COVID-19 vaccines saved lives, and at Thursday’s hearing cast doubt on statistics about how people died during the pandemic and on estimates about how many deaths were averted — statistics produced by the agencies he oversees.
“Secretary Kennedy is right. I don’t really know the actual number because it’s just a lot of data issues,” Bhattacharya said during an appearance on “America Right Now.”
“But I’ll just give you one that’s, like, really concrete. If in order to be diagnosed with COVID it was possible to have a prior test that that happened — maybe even before you enter the hospital — and you were you enter the hospital for something else, … you were still counted as a COVID case.
“And you’re absolutely right also that we paid hospitals tens of thousands of dollars per COVID patient. So they had very strong incentives to diagnose and find COVID, even if the COVID was just incidental,” he said.
“We don’t know the exact numbers. And it’s going to be very difficult, if impossible, to get them, because the data systems that the Biden administration set up and the incentives that they created, made the data corrupt in a way that it’s hard to disentangle.”
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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