CDC Hiding Data Because It Might Be 'Misinterpreted' to Show Vaccines Are Ineffective

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.

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 [...]

[...] 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 said.

[...] 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.

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."

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

[...] 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.

Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons.

Public Health Scotland will stop publishing data on covid deaths and hospitalisations by vaccination status - over concerns it is misrepresented by anti-vaxx campaigners.

[...] PHS officials said significant concerns about the data being misused deliberately by anti-vaccination campaigners is behind the move.

[...] The data has been promoted on social media by the American right-wing opinion website, The Blaze, and anti-vaxxer American talking head Alex Berenson.

13 out of the 104 people who died of Covid in Scotland in the week ending Feb. 4 were unvaccinated. In the 4 weeks ending Feb. 4, 61 of the 478 people were unvaccinated. (That’s equivalent to about 30,000 deaths in the United States.)

In other words, almost 9 out of 10 of the people who die in Scotland are vaccinated, and the vast majority of those are boosted. And deaths remain stubbornly high, even though Omicron is far milder.