You may have seen a story in the last couple of days trumpeted, something to the effect that the “White House new projections claims there will be 3000 dead a day” starting in early June.

According to Townhall, CNN’s Erin Burnett spread the claim. CNN’s John King also spread the claim, claiming also that the “projections” from an “internal Trump administration estimate” said there would be “3000 deaths a day” and “200,000 new cases a day” by June 1.

But the White House Press Secretary Judd Deere blasted CNN for those claims saying that they were not true and they ignored the statements that he had sent them saying it wasn’t true.

Even though I released a statement today, which multiple people at @CNN confirmed receiving, @CNN just aired a package about a "new internal document" on #COVID19 deaths with no mention of my statement that said this is not a WH doc & is not reflective of data the TF analysed.

— Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere45) May 4, 2020

.@CNN also failed to mention that Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health today said this slide deck was a preliminary analyses developed by them and was done to aid in scenario planning – not to be used as forecasts. And it's not accurate to present them as forecasts.

— Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere45) May 4, 2020

The President has no higher priority than the health of the American people, and spreading misinformation like this is irresponsible and only meant to cause panic.

— Judd Deere (@JuddPDeere45) May 4, 2020

Deere said he had confirmation from people who worked at CNN that they received the statement he released about how the document from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which projected a higher death toll from the novel virus, was not a “new internal document” from the White House and it was not a forecast, but rather to help them with “scenario planning.”

You would likely have a lot of models run and estimates run based on a variety of different options or scenarios. That doesn’t make them official “projections.”

This was then morphed into claims that the CDC was saying this which obviously wasn’t the case.

So they were told ahead of time it wasn’t from the White House, that it wasn’t projections, that it was an external, not internal document from an outside organization providing estimates about various scenarios. But even though they were told, they ran with it anyway, with all the shock and abject horror they could muster. Why stick to the truth, when you can hype panic?