CDC withholding COVID data

We reported earlier on the Food & Drug Administration’s wanting to wait decades before releasing crucial data on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, and reported just yesterday on the hesitance around discussing and researching COVID-19 vaccine side effects. Now, the New York Times reports: “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. … the agency leading the country’s response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected… 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.” They quote a CDC spokeswoman as saying that one “reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted”. A scientist is quoted as saying, “The C.D.C. is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization”.

The article adds: “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.” Source.

Okay then.