| There is nothing more important to effective public health policy than having accurate and verifiable data. It appears, however, that the CDC irreparably compromised COVID-19 data quality during a time of public crisis by 1) abruptly implementing new procedures for capturing COVID-19 mortality data via a March 24, 2020 document from the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System, thereby significantly altering death certificate reporting and 2) adopting the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists’ April 15, 2020 position paper for defining what constitutes a COVID case — without implementing safeguards to ensure that single individuals would not be counted multiple times, thus altering case counts and subsequent data. More than 15,000 hours of investigative research shows that these practices have significantly affected COVID-19 data aggregation and interpretation. Moreover, the CDC’s actions appear to be in violation of three federal laws: the Administrative Procedures Act, the Paperwork Reduction Act, and the Information Quality Act — laws that were specifically put into place to protect the welfare of the millions of Americans whose affairs are regulated by federal government agencies. | 
