2020 through 2022. Anyone asking whether people who died with COVID were being counted as dying from COVID got lumped in with conspiracy theorists. Mainstream coverage mostly treated the official death counts as beyond question. FNN found no single CNN segment to pin it on, so this is a broad-media page.

July 2023, Clinical Infectious Diseases. Researchers at the VA and Tufts Medical Center reviewed deaths within 30 days of a positive test, which was a common way of attributing deaths to COVID. Among vaccinated VA patients who died, the share whose death was actually COVID-related dropped from 69% in January and February 2022 to 47% in June through August 2022. Their conclusion: by mid-2022, the 30-day method did not give an accurate estimate of COVID deaths in hospitals with routine screening.

Now the other half, because FNN doesn't cherry-pick. Excess-death studies, which compare all deaths against what was expected, found that official COVID counts undercounted deaths in many U.S. counties from 2020 to early 2022 (medRxiv, 2023). So: overcount in some hospital data in the Omicron era. Undercount of the pandemic's total toll. Both were legitimate questions. Neither one was a conspiracy.

FNN analysis: once honest measurement questions were declared off-limits, people stopped believing the numbers that really were solid. Gallup: 40% trust in 2020, 34% by 2022.