Last year, the CDC was chastised for neglecting to follow so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans. The latest controversy that the CDC find themselves in started from them admitting to withholding widespread vaccine efficacy data.
According to the New York Times, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has already been gathering extensive statistics on Covid hospitalizations for more than a year, breaking down cases by age, race, and vaccination status, but the organization has hidden much of it from the public.
Furthermore, the agency seemed to have selectively released material to promote promotional narrative.
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. -NYT
As the Times points out, most of the material suppressed might benefit state and local health officials in their attempts to control the pandemic. For example, comprehensive breakdowns of hospitalizations by age and race could aid policymakers in identifying the most vulnerable populations so that resources can be allocated more properly, such as whether healthy adults require booster vaccinations.
The CDCâs lack of transparency is âbecause, basically, at the end of the day, itâs not yet ready for prime time,â according to spokesperson Kristen Nordlund, who also stated that the agencyâs âpriority when gathering any data is to ensure that itâs accurate and actionable.â
Nordlund also expressed concern that the material could be âmisinterpreted.â
Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the CDCâs deputy director for public health, believes the pandemic uncovered flaws in the agencyâs information systems â as well as those at the state level, which he claims arenât keeping pace with the sheer amount of data.
âWe want better, faster data that can lead to decision making and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate the lag in data that has held us back,â he said.
Another reason is that the CDC is engulfed in red tape, with âmultiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important publications, as well as obligations to alert the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the White House of its activities.
Last year, the CDC was chastised for neglecting to follow so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, which they initially described as âextremely rare,â then ârare,â before changing the focus to how the vaccine still avoided mortality (yet, they omitted the fact that these were largely elderly and those with comorbidities).
According to a government official acquainted with the CDCâs data gathering, the organization has been tracking patients since the Covid immunizations were introduced, and has also been hesitant to make those statistics public âbecause they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.â
Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years. -NYT
âWe have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,â said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist who was part of the team that conducted the Covid Tracking Project, an autonomous effort that gathered data on the pandemic until March 2021. She went on to say that a thorough investigation âbuilds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of whatâs actually going on.â
Experts are similarly split on the possibility of âmisinterpretation.â
âWe are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,â said Rivera.
In the meantime, according to Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatricsâ Committee on Infectious Diseases, itâs been challenging to pinpoint CDC data on the percentage of children hospitalised for Covid who have other health issues, which was requested in December and told it was unavailable.
On the plus side, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been providing city wastewater data, which is a reliable signal for detecting covid increases in a population. Of course, this doesnât show you whether booster shots are effective in people aged 18 to 49.