Health Officials Unveil Rotating Committee to Pick Whichever Death-Count Method Looks Best That Quarter
The new panel will convene every few months solely to choose the tallying method that flatters the outbreak numbers most.
Amid a measles outbreak in Pennsylvania that has produced a third reported death, federal health officials have announced a permanent Methodology Selection Committee, a body whose only stated task is to review the available ways of counting deaths and pick whichever one yields the smallest number before the next public update.
The committee will not investigate cases, review coroners' findings, or study transmission. Its charter, according to internal materials describing the arrangement, consists of a single recurring agenda item: compare this quarter's candidate methodologies side by side and adopt whichever produces the most favorable total, then repeat the exercise next quarter regardless of which method that turns out to be.
"We don't count deaths so much as we shop for them," said a committee chair whose title and department go unspecified in the materials. "Every method tells a slightly different story, and it's our job to find the one that tells the shortest one."
Officials say the committee's meetings will themselves be tracked using a methodology to be determined by a future committee, and that the criteria for selecting a counting method will likewise be subject to quarterly review by whichever method is selected to evaluate criteria.
Asked whether the arrangement might eventually produce a method that counts zero deaths in perpetuity, the chair said only that such a method exists, is under consideration, and would be adopted immediately if it weren't currently disqualified on the grounds of being too obviously the best option to choose without further review.