NYT’s Raises Questions About Data
Recently the New York Times published an article explaining that the CDC isn’t publishing “large portions of the COVID data” they collect. The paper also disclosed that the CDC has “withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and wastewater analyses.”
According to the NYT’s the CDC left out “a huge portion” of data in their paper showing the “effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65.”
From the New York Times:
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 report states that the lack of data has forced state and local officials to rely on data from Israel instead of on data collected inside the USA.
CDC spokeswoman, Kristen Nordlund told reporters that the data is not “ready for prime time.”
More from the Times:
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.
Experts believe that scientists inside the CDC are hitting a bureaucratic wall that could be preventing the data from going public.
“The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. “The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC.”
To keep the fact-checkers happy below is a direct quote from the Times:
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.
Experts aren’t happy with the excuse given either.
Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist who ran a COVID tracking project said, “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years.”
She added that a “data vacuum” does not build trust and creates a potential for more misinformation.
“We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” Ms. Rivera said.
The report in the Times shows us that even people in the media want their normal lives back and are frustrated with a lack of transparency.
