[socrates1998]

Another example of the people who control the data often can control the narrative that they want.

The irony that data is supposed to have more truth to it than narratives is not lost on me.

Regardless of the details of this example, it's scary how in the dark the public is for something that is insanely important to live and death.

[brlewis]

I'm drawing the opposite conclusion. That it's hard to conspire to keep the public in the dark about data, due to the large number of people involved in gathering, processing, and presenting it.

[xamuel]

Amen. And the weirdest part is it seems like whenever people manipulate the data, it's always to support whatever narrative I oppose. Any time the data supports the narrative I favor, said data is reliable and trustworthy. Has anyone else noticed this? Isn't it weird?

[rhacker]

Even if we have all this math at our disposal, there's always a way to include all data points you have private access to show the outcome you want. It would be useful if we had some kind of open record act, as long as it doesn't reveal PII - if a government agency shows us a graph, we should have the means to duplicate it by getting access to the raw data (clipped of PII - i.e. Date of Birth turns into age range buckets) Probably a no-go, but I'm just saying data can be manipulated if you don't have unfettered access to it. I'm not saying this to support this specific case - just pondering a possible answer to your question.