Why Isn't the WHO Making the Global COVID Death Toll Public?

The World Health Organization has spent the last several months trying to count the number of people who died of COVID-19 around the world.

It’s a daunting task. Figures from 189 countries have to be gathered and tabulated as well as analyzed for their truthfulness and accuracy. But the agency has mountains of data to help and they believe they’ve arrived at a “best guess” for the grim tally.

According to the WHO, 15 million people died during the pandemic. This includes people who died of something other than COVID but tested positive for the coronavirus. It also includes an estimate of people who died who were unable to get proper health care because they couldn’t travel due to the pandemic.

As an “accurate” number of deaths from COVID, it’s meaningless. But as a political hand grenade, the numbers are incredibly explosive.

India, which still insists that “only” 520,000 of their citizens succumbed to the virus, is holding up the release of an official tally because the WHO is saying that at least 4 million Indians died of COVID. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi is coming under attack from the opposition for his obvious lies.

Modi claims no Indian ever died because of an oxygen shortage. But relatives and family members were begging the government and the world for oxygen to save their loved ones all through the worst of the pandemic in the summer of 2021.

Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi called out Modi on Twitter on Sunday, accusing him of “not speaking the truth and not allowing others to speak the truth.”

Meanwhile, the Indian government claims that the WHO’s methodology was flawed because they used the same formulas for India as they did for smaller countries. But the real reason India is fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of the study is that Modi’s theories about the coronavirus proved themselves to be spectacularly wrong.

Whether the methodology used by WHO was flawed is debatable. What’s important is the delay in releasing the numbers.

The New York Times:

The delay in releasing the figures is significant because the global data is essential for understanding how the pandemic has played out and what steps could mitigate a similar crisis in the future. It has created turmoil in the normally staid world of health statistics — a feud cloaked in anodyne language is playing out at the United Nations Statistical Commission, the world body that gathers health data, spurred by India’s refusal to cooperate.

“It’s important for global accounting and the moral obligation to those who have died, but also important very practically. If there are subsequent waves, then really understanding the death total is key to knowing if vaccination campaigns are working,” said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research in Toronto and a member of the expert working group supporting the W.H.O.’s excess death calculation. “And it’s important for accountability.”

Some of the experts involved in the final product are so concerned they’re threatening to release the data with or without India’s — or the WHO’s — blessing.

The Times spoke with more than 10 people familiar with the data. The W.H.O. had planned to make the numbers public in January but the release has continually been pushed back.

Recently, a few members of the group warned the W.H.O. that if the organization did not release the figures, the experts would do so themselves, three people familiar with the matter said.

India’s death tally was the only national number from the study released by the Times. Given the criteria they are using to count fatalities, the death toll for the United States — currently reported at 987,000 — is almost certainly well over a million.

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But the number of COVID deaths was only important when it was being used to hammer Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential campaign. Now, despite Biden being in charge when far more deaths were reported than when Trump was president, the number is a “tragedy,” not an “outrage.”