The Florida Department of Health (DOH) alleged Friday that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) erroneously changed the state’s COVID-19 data without contacting the agency and didn’t respond to calls to correct the problem.
Jeremy Redfern, press secretary for the state health agency, said that the DOH transmits COVID-19 data, including deaths, to the CDC several times per week.
The CDC, he said, will ultimately have to restore the 20,000 or so Florida deaths that were allegedly erroneously deleted from the tracker.
“All those cases they deleted, they’re going to have to put back on there. And my guess is they’re not going to tell anybody that they’re putting it back on there. They’re just going to do it and hope that nobody notices,” Redfern told the outlet.
The CDC took “about a week” to try to fix the issue, he said, adding that the federal agency on Thursday sent Florida’s data back to the health agency for a correction.
“Instead of calling us and verifying these data, they decided to switch to a different field in the data set and just delete a bunch of our deaths,” Redfern told the publication.
The Epoch Times has contacted the CDC and DOH for comment.
Last week, when making the change on its website, the CDC explained that “data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error” that “resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories.” Previously, the CDC adjusted its death count in August 2021 after a “data discrepancy” was identified.