Well this is incredibly discouraging.
The New York Times is reporting that the CDC has collected loads of data on COVID hospitalizations in the United States, broken down into age, race, and vaccination status. But, because they don’t trust the public with the data, most of the information has gone unreleased.
“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,” several people familiar with the data told NYT.
“Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early,” NYT reports.
“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,” the report adds.
“Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C., said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data ‘because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.’ She said the agency’s ‘priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable,’” NYT continues.
“The C.D.C. 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 C.D.C.”
The CDC has published only a tiny fraction of the Covid data it has collected, including critical data on boosters and hospitalizations, citing incomplete reports or fears of misinterpretation. Critics say the practice causes confusion. https://t.co/MUldVe6RGQ
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 21, 2022
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