The New York Times made an eye-popping admission on Sunday regarding data collected by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on Covid-19 vaccines.
In an article titled, “The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects,” reporter Apoorva Mandavilli writes: “For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public.”
Mandavilli, who covers science and global health for the Times, reported that the agency has published “only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected” since the pandemic began, including data on booster efficacy for 18 – 49 year-olds, a tremendous chunk of the U.S. population.
Reasons listed include bureaucracy, sample size, and not being “ready for prime time,” but one that’s definitely set to raise lots of eyebrows is the claim that the data could be “misinterpreted” by Covid vaccine skeptics.
From the report:
Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status.
But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.
Instead, health experts have been forced to rely on data from Israel and elsewhere to make decisions, the Times reported.
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