Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

What Is The CDC Hiding? Agency Admits Withholding Widespread Vaccine
Efficacy Data

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/health/covid-boosters-older-younger.html

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been
collecting detailed information on Covid hospitalizations for more
than a year which breaks cases down by age, race and vaccination
status - yet the agency has withheld most of it from the public
according to the New York Times.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention

What's more, the agency appears to have selectively published
information to support messaging behind boosters.

    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 notes, much of the withheld information could aid in
state and local health decisions in their efforts to bring the virus
under control. Detailed breakdowns of hospitalizations by age and
race, for example, could help officials identify the most at-risk
populations in order to more efficiently allocate resources - such as
whether healthy adults need booster shots.

According to CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund, the agency's lack of
disclosure is "because, basically, at the end of the day, it's not yet
ready for prime time," adding that the agency's "priority when
gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable."

Nordlund also said the agency is afraid that the information might be
'misinterpreted.'

CDC deputy director for public health, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, says that
the pandemic exposed weaknesses in the agency's data systems - and
those at the state levels, which he says aren't keeping up with the
sheer volume of data.

"We 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," he said.

Another excuse; the CDC apparently is awash in red tape and has
'multiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important
publications,' along with requirements to notify the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) and the White House of their plans.

The agency came under fire last year for failing to track so-called
breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans - which they said
would be 'extremely rare,' and then 'rare,' and then the messaging
started shifting to how the vaccine still prevented death (yet, they
omitted the fact that these were largely elderly and those with
comorbidities).

According to a federal official familiar with the CDC's data
collection, the agency has been keeping tabs on patients since Covid
vaccines were rolled out - and that the agency has been reluctant to
make those figures public "because they might be misinterpreted as the
vaccines being ineffective."

    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

"We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two
years," said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the
team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that
compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021. She added that a
detailed analysis "builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer
picture of what's actually going on."

Experts also disagree on the potential for 'misinterpretation."

"We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data
vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and
caveats," said Rivera.

Meanwhile, it's been difficult to locate CDC data on the percentage of
children hospitalized for Covid who have other medical conditions,
according to Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of
Pediatrics’s Committee on Infectious Diseases, which asked for that
information in December and were told it was unavailable.

On the bright side, the CDC has been releasing city wastewater data -
a reliable indicator for measuring covid spikes among a population. Of
course, that doesn't tell you if booster shots are working in
18-to-49-year-olds.