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This paper analyzes the origins and consolidation of the “statistical argument” (Desrosières 2008) regarding mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on mortality in nursing homes. Health data are approached from the perspective of “bio power,” and the paper explores the social conditions of the production and dissemination of nursing home mortality data. We show that they are the result of a territorial and national “agençology” of public health characterized by a myriad of actors, generating vagueness, uncertainty, and data that is all the more fragile because the statistical conventions were at an emergent stage, in a period nevertheless marked by the centralization of power. The fragility of the mortality figures is mirrored by the fragility of the nursing home institution. We show that these mortality figures are flawed, in particular as a result of economic (lack of means) and institutional (tension between health and social care) fragility.