Gov. Newsom’s COVID ‘Science’ is ‘Political Science’ -

Are Newsom and Public Health agency burying COVID data to keep state locked down?

Friday, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that public school students in most of California will not be attending school in person this fall.

“The virus will be with us for a year or more, and school districts must provide meaningful instruction in the midst of this pandemic,” Newsom said during his press conference Friday. “In California, health data will determine when a school can be physically open -– and when it must close –- but learning should never stop. Students, staff, and parents all prefer in-classroom instruction, but only if it can be done safely.”

The “health data” he refers to and the “science” he continually claims to be following show that there are zero deaths in California of young people under age 18.

Currently, California shows 6,044,039 COVID-19 tests have been administered, 366,164 positive tests, 7,475 deaths from COVID, leaving 5,677,935 negative tests. Gov. Newsom never discusses the negative tests, or the dropping death rate from COVID-19.

Interestingly, California’s COVID-19 website has either removed or buried the mortality data due to COVID in California. Up to recently, deaths were broken down by age, showing there were no COVID deaths of anyone under age 18 in the state. The state’s COVID data page doesn’t include age breakdowns of those who have died as a result of COVID-19.

California Globe has filed Public Records Requests for mortality data from the Department of Public Health, but has been stymied. “California officials whose COVID-19 responses were once hailed as enlightened are now receiving criticism—and some of the sharpest is coming from scientists seeking to help guide the state’s fight against the virus,” ScienceMag.org recently reported. “Since April, epidemiologists from Stanford University and several University of California campuses have sought detailed COVID-19 case and contact-tracing data from state and county health authorities for research they hope will point to more effective approaches to slowing the pandemic. ‘It’s a basic mantra of epidemiology and public health: Follow the data’ to learn where and how the disease spreads, says Rajiv Bhatia, a physician and epidemiologist who teaches at Stanford and is among those seeking the California data.”

“But the agencies have refused requests filed from April through late June, Science has learned. They cited multiple reasons including workload constraints and privacy concerns—” as California Globe reported in May.

California Globe filed a Public Records Request May 13th with the California Health and Human Services Agency Director Mark Ghaly, Chief Information Officer Adam Dondro, and General Counsel Gabriel Ravel seeking documents, facts, opinions, data, and analysis, that have been used to guide or inform on the public health justification for the latest of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s updates on California’s re-opening policy, as well as state or local social distancing measures to prevent Covid-19, as well as 2020 California mortality data.

Within hours of sending the records request in, we received a written response back from Attorney Michael Palmisano, Office of the Agency General Counsel for the California Health and Human Services Agency. In a dismissive letter, Mr. Palmisano responded:

“CHHS has determined it possesses no documents responsive to your request. By providing you with this information, CHHS considers your Public Records Act request fulfilled, and the file is now closed. Thank you for your interest in this matter.”

We have been in contact with Epidemiologists, Professors of Medicine and Public Health, Professors of Medicine and Research scientists who say they know that these records must indeed exist. Some of these medical professionals have been public health officers who say they never issued such a dismissive letter to a public records request.

So is Gov. Gavin Newsom really using science and data to base his decisions on the ever-expanding re-opening of California, as he says in every daily briefing, or is his “science” political science? Is Health and Human Services Agency Director Mark Ghaly M.D. basing his recommendations on data, or are both Ghaly and Newsom still using the flawed, discredited models, and not considering total mortality?

Reputable Epidemiologists say these COVID-19 models are “grounded in important assumptions about which there is currently little knowledge.”

Bhatia says, “In 4 months of the epidemic, collecting millions of records, no one in California or at the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has done the basic epidemiology,” ScienceMag.org reported.

“Bhatia and colleagues say detailed COVID-19 case data could be mined to find the combinations of factors most responsible for the “biggest bundles of hospitalizations and deaths.” He hypothesizes the data would, for example, confirm that even as commerce opens up, hospitalizations and deaths still primarily emerge from widely cited flashpoints, including elderly care facilities and large households that include infected essential workers who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and pass the disease to relatives who have risk factors making them more vulnerable to severe illness.”

Instead of locking 40 million Californians down…

“’We think you can be more strategic on your interventions if you know where exposures actually occur,’ says Jeffrey Klausner, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is also seeking the California data. For example, case data might confirm patchy evidence suggesting indoor dining is risky, but parks and beaches are generally safe. If so, reopening outdoor settings with reasonable precautions might boost the economy and allay fears that severe risk of infection is ubiquitous.”

Bhatia and Klausner are referring to real science – not Political Science as Gov. Newsom relies on. There is no reason not to open schools, and no reason most counties are still under strict lockdown orders.

Katy GrimesKaty Grimes, the Editor of the California Globe, is a long-time Investigative Journalist covering the California State Capitol, and the co-author of California’s War Against Donald Trump: Who Wins? Who Loses?