Political “throttling” and fear that data was flawed and might be misinterpreted.
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Point of emphasis: This is coming from the New York Times !
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.
The agency has withheld critical data on boosters and hospitalizations.
For more than a year, the CDC has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status.
But it has not made most of the information public.
The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C. has made 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 has repeatedly come under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans
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When challenged, the CDC didn’t deny the allegations, but rather, offered up 3 explanations for why they withheld the data:
> Data isn’t accurate enough.
The collected data was “sampling data“ that was “not yet ready for prime time” because “data systems at the C.D.C., and at the state levels, are outmoded and not up to handling large volumes of data.”
> Data might be misinterpreted.
“The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public because they might be misinterpreted (by anti-vaccine groups) as indicating that the vaccines were ineffective.”
> Data is politically throttled
“The C.D.C. is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization. The steps that it takes to get (data) released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the C.D.C.”
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But, not to worry since the C.D.C. has received more than $1 billion to modernize its data collection and systems.
That works for the data accuracy defense … but does nothing to heal the self-inflicted wounds: fear of what the “unwashed” will do with the data … or, screening the data for political reasons.
It’s hard to “follow the data and the science” when the scientists are withholding the data.
Trust but verify, right?
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The Homa Files 