Fact Check By: Craig Jones, Newswise

Truthfulness:

Claim:

CDC director admits over 75% of Covid deaths had at least 4 pathological conditions (comorbidities).Since the total death rate is 0.27% this means healthy people have a 0.0% death risk. #WakeUp #NothingToFearButFearItself

Claim Publisher and Date: Del Bigtree on Twitter (among others) on 2022-01-09

Widely shared social media posts, including this one by "Vaxxed" director Del Bigtree shows a clip of CDC director Rochelle Walensky on ABC's Good Morning America. The clip has Walensky referring to a recent study that found over 75% of COVID-19 deaths in fully vaccinated people had occurred among those with at least four risk factors. The clip that Bigtree and others have shared omits the reference to vaccinated people. Welensky did not say 75% percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. had at least four comorbidities. The shared social media posts imply that deaths from COVID-19 are being over-counted. We find this claim to be misleading, having taken Walensky's interview out of context. It is clear from watching the full clip, Dr. Welensky was referring to the percentage of fully vaccinated people who died from COVID-19.

In the original video, Walensky replies to the interviewer with the following response, “You know really important study if I may just summarize it. A study of 1.2 million people who were vaccinated between December and October and demonstrated that severe disease occurred in about 0.015% of the people who received their primary series and death in 0.003% of those people. The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities. So really these are people who were unwell to begin with. And yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.”

The study referenced by Walensky can be seen in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published on January 7th by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It involved around 1.2 million individuals between December 2020 and October 2021, and found that among the vaccinated people surveyed, 189 people had severe disease and 36 people had died. It also found that all those who became seriously ill had at least one risk factor while 78% who died had at least four. 

It is true that underlying medical conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease, or cancer are known to increase the likelihood of serious illness and death from COVID-19. This does not mean that perfectly healthy people are at zero percent risk of death.

According to a recent article published by Yale Medicine...

COVID-19 also has led to serious illness and even death in younger and middle-aged adults who are otherwise healthy. While most children have mild or no symptoms, some have gotten severely ill. As with adults, even if children have no symptoms, they can spread the virus to others.