I saw this question come up in an interview between RFK Jr. and Naomi Wolf in the spring of this year. She pointed out this out:

...most of the major news outlets who’ve reported on the pandemic cite the COVID-19 Tracking Project or Johns Hopkins database. So again, I build databases like this myself with developers, so I know exactly that you can tell any story at all with a digital database. It just depends on what you’re feeding in the backend, as we call it. And no one gets to see the raw datasets that these COVID platforms are declaring. So every day you see, or this was true until about six weeks ago, you would see these vast, scary charts. Always the cumulative number was reported as if it was that day’s number, very deceptive. But even if that wasn’t deceptive, it was datasets you couldn’t see, datasets you couldn’t vet or confirm as a reporter. It’s not confirmed. It’s just a dashboard saying this is the situation. And who owns those platforms?

So Mike Bloomberg funds the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health that provides one of the platforms. And also the COVID-19 Tracking Project uses data from a hedge fund called Enigma Business Solutions, I kid you not. And who just bought it? Well, “The Atlantic” houses it. And it’s not a government agency. It’s not a medical site. And who just bought “The Atlantic”? Mike Bloomberg. And who puts the kind of graph of COVID infections and deaths right underneath other Bloomberg kind of share recommendations worldwide, bond recommendations worldwide, Mike Bloomberg. So in my analysis of this kind of 360 degree control of the information about a pandemic, it’s also a way to legally kind of, legally illegally invest in the stock market. In other words, if you can control the economy, and you know five minutes before Mike Bloomberg puts it up on the COVID-19 Tracking Project that there’s gonna be a drop or there’s going to be rise, you’ll know whether to keep your shares in Amazon or sell your shares in Amazon. So it’s a fantastic way for a few rich guys and their buddies to take any risk out of capitalism basically, with us and our lives and our kids’ lives being the media by which they short and long the economy.