When Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) recently asked Robert F. Kennedy Jr. last week how many people died in the United States from COVID-19, Kennedy said “nobody knows” because of “data chaos” at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet, there is very good data on how many Americans died from the virus.
CDC estimates indicate 1,231,440 Americans died from COVID-19. Kennedy’s attempt to discredit this data is likely an effort to justify his hostile actions against the health agency or to minimize the danger of the virus, which is still affecting people today.
A few straightforward numbers from the Social Security Administration illustrate the credibility of CDC’s numbers. In the three years before COVID-19 arrived in the United States, the number of Social Security beneficiaries who died during the year had a flat trend: 2,351,959 in 2017, 2,377,978 in 2018, and 2,378,162 in 2019.
What happened in 2020? The number of beneficiaries who died surged to 2,772,037 — about 400,000 more deaths than in any of the prior three years.
The second year of COVID-19, 2021, also saw a remarkably high number of deaths among Social Security beneficiaries. In that year, 2,827,441 deaths occurred, which is about 450,000 more deaths than any of the prior three years before COVID-19. Deaths declined in 2022, but were still elevated over prior years at 2,710,105.
All told, Social Security beneficiary deaths in the 2020-2022 period exceeded those in the 2017-2019 period by more than 1 million. Of course, Social Security beneficiaries were not the only individuals killed by COVID-19, but they bore the brunt of the pandemic because the virus was especially dangerous to elderly and disabled individuals.
Social Security's data comes from administrative actions, not the CDC. Social Security terminates benefits upon death, generally when it receives a death report from a funeral home. The fact that Social Security data tracks the CDC data so well and clearly reflects the arrival of the virus in 2020 shows that Kennedy’s “data chaos” statement is unfounded.
Social Security's death data also closely track the known milestones of the pandemic. New York was the epicenter of the virus when it first arrived in the U.S. in 2020. As widely reported in the press at the time, COVID-19 had catastrophic effects, particularly on residents of nursing homes and longer-term, institutional facilities. A detailed study using Social Security data found that disability beneficiaries in institutional settings in the New York region were seven times more likely to die in April 2020 than in the year prior (April 2019). The study also found deaths among Social Security disability beneficiaries spiked in the deadly pandemic winter months and with the emergence of new variants.
Kennedy’s remarks reflect a broader effort to construct a “revisionist” history of COVID-19. Vaccine skeptics hope to create a narrative that the virus was never really that dangerous. But this vague, indirect attack on medical interventions is almost certainly going to lead to poor policy choices about how to deal with COVID-19 going forward.
The vaccine policies of the Trump administration are beginning to take shape. The FDA recently approved updated COVID-19 vaccines for two groups: persons 65 or older and younger persons who are at high risk for severe outcomes from the virus. Unless communication becomes much clearer, however, there is going to be substantial confusion over who qualifies as high risk.
In the study of Social Security disability beneficiaries, the likelihood of death did not vary substantially by primary impairment. Disability beneficiaries whose primary impairment was mental (for example, severe depression) had elevated risks of death from COVID-19, but members of this group would not necessarily think they had a physical medical condition that put them at high risk.
Even among individuals with physical conditions, there will be substantial confusion over who can get COVID-19 vaccines. During the hearing, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) highlighted the case of a stage four lung cancer patient who was denied access to a vaccination. Indeed, among senators, there was concern that Kennedy was muddying the issue of who will be eligible.
Kennedy could address that concern by formulating and implementing a coherent communication plan to high-risk individuals and their medical providers.
Going forward, Social Security's death data is potentially an important source of information for public health discussions and policy decisions. Unfortunately, efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency have made the data less available. Earlier this year, Social Security ended the production and distribution of data from the Disability Analysis File, which contained detailed information on beneficiary deaths and other information from Social Security’s record systems. The Trump administration should consider overriding that decision and, in addition, making similar information available for Social Security’s retirement and survivor beneficiaries.
David A. Weaver, Ph.D., is an economist and retired federal employee who has authored a number of studies on the Social Security program. His views do not necessarily reflect those of any organization.
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