One of the challenges of covering the coronavirus pandemic from the beginning was trying to get complex data to analyze.
Scientists could collect some and publish studies. But if their conclusions did not match the current narrative, their work was deemed “misinformation” and suppressed.
Now comes news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has collected data on hospitalizations for covid in the country down by age, race, and vaccination status for over a year.
Yet, it has not made most of the information public.
When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.Two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected, several people familiar with the data said.Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early.Without the booster data for 18- to 49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots.
Data, shmata. When you have vaccines to promote and new pharmaceuticals to sell, there is no need to offer the public details on actual vaccine efficacy or numbers that allow people to conduct a personal risk assessment.
Multiple outside public health experts blasted the CDC’s slow release of information.
Epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera was on the team that ran the Covid Tracking Project, an independent project that collected and published pandemic data until March 2021. She commented that they had been “begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years.”Rivera was also dismissive of the CDC’s excuse about trying to prevent the data from being misinterpreted. “We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” she said.Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, expressed frustration over the difficulty of obtaining CDC data on children who were hospitalized with Covid and had other medical conditions.“They’ve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us,” she said. “I mean, you can’t find out anything from them.”
Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, also derided the agency‘s stranglehold on information.
He noted that, because the CDC had not published the information, American scientists were forced to rely on Israeli data.’There’s no reason that they should be better at collecting and putting forth data than we were,’ he said.’The CDC is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them.’
There will be many shocking and disturbing conclusions when these numbers are thoroughly reviewed.
Meanwhile, here is an excellent summary related to godlet Dr. Anthony Fauci’s pronouncements on vaccine efficacy.
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