The American Society of Registered Nurses published a very important (and relatively under-reported) article in the Journal of Advanced Practice Nursing back in October of 2014.

The article , titled 'Do Not Believe Everything You Read About Flu Deaths', discusses how researchers used official death certificate information to expose the CDC's massive statistical manipulation of seasonal flu figures.

Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160306064821/http://www.asrn.org/journal-advanced-practice-nursing/1212-do-not-believe-everything-you-read-about-flu-deaths.html

This article should be read by everyone, but here are some of the highlights:

Flu results in "about 250,000 to 500,000 yearly deaths" worldwide, Wikipedia tells us. "The typical estimate is 36,000 [deaths] a year in the United States," reports NBC, citing the Centers for Disease Control.

The numbers differ wildly from the sober tallies recorded on death certificates -- by law every certificate must show a cause -- and reported by the official agencies that collect and keep vital statistics.

According to the National Vital Statistics System in the U.S., for example, annual flu deaths in 2010 amounted to just 500 per year -- fewer than deaths from ulcers (2,977), hernias (1,832) and pregnancy and childbirth (825), and a far cry from the big killers such as heart disease (597,689) and cancers (574,743).

Even that 500 figure for the U.S. could be too high, according to analyses in authoritative journals such as the American Journal of Public Health and the British Medical Journal.

Only about 15-20 per cent of people who come down with flu-like symptoms have the influenza virus -- the other 80-85 per cent actually caught rhinovirus or other germs that are indistinguishable from the true flu without laboratory tests, which are rarely done.

In 2001, a year in which death certificates listed 257 Americans as having died of flu, only 18 were positively identified as true flus. The other 239 were simply assumed to be flus and most likely had few true flus among them.

Because the flu was rarely an "underlying cause of death," the CDC created the sound-alike term, "influenza-associated death." Using this new, loose definition, CDC's computer models could tally people who died of a heart ailment or other causes after having the flu.

The CDC's decision to play up flu deaths dates back a decade, when it realized the public wasn't following its advice on the flu vaccine. During the 2003 flu season "the manufacturers were telling us that they weren't receiving a lot of orders for vaccine," Dr. Glen Nowak, associate director for communications at CDC's National Immunization Program, told National Public Radio. "It really did look like we needed to do something to encourage people to get a flu shot."

"Medical experts and public health authorities [should] publicly (e.g. via media) state concern and alarm (and predict dire outcomes) - and urge influenza vaccination." This recipe, his slide show indicated, would result in "Significant media interest and attention ... in terms that motivate behavior (e.g. as 'very severe,' 'more severe than last or past years,' 'deadly')."

Other emotive recommendations included fostering "the perception that many people are susceptible to a bad case of influenza" and "Visible/tangible examples of the seriousness of the illness (e.g., pictures of children, families of those affected coming forward) and people getting vaccinated (the first to motivate, the latter to reinforce)."

[article snipped and emphasis added]

The manipulation is not just limited to the US. The article says it is the same in Canada, and I would not be surprised if this is also occurring elsewhere as well.

Related article from the British Medical Journal:

'Are US flu death figures more PR than science?'

https://www.bmj.com/content/331/7529/1412

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) acknowledges a difference between flu death and flu associated death yet uses the terms interchangeably. Additionally, there are significant statistical incompatibilities between official estimates and national vital statistics data.

Compounding these problems is a marketing of fear —a CDC communications strategy in which medical experts “predict dire outcomes” during flu seasons.

This is Propaganda 101, brought to you by the same fake news media and lying CDC that are now pushing corona fear like it's going out of style.

If these same people would lie, year after year, about the seasonal flu statistics and dangers, then why on Earth should we trust them about the Coronavirus?

I have noticed that some news reports use similar word manipulation when reporting their statistics. They say coronavirus-related deaths or coronavirus-associated illness when reporting on the numbers.