President Joe Biden, joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and Director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Dr. Rochelle Walensky, talks with CDC staff during a briefing Friday, March 19, 2021, at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
A vaccine expert and advisor at the FDA, Dr. Paul Offit, is pleading with the CDC, to tell the truth, and to release data it has collected on 33 million Americans about COVID-19 vaccines.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has withheld vast swaths of the information it holds about the impact of COVID-19, leading to anger from the scientific community and speculation the agency is not releasing the data because it weakens the case for booster shots in certain demographics.
Two weeks ago, the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65.
But the agency, led by Dr Rochelle Walensky, did not share the information on those aged 18-49, who are considered to be the least likely to benefit from a booster.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has withheld vast swaths of the information it holds about the impact of COVID-19, leading to anger from the scientific community and speculation the agency is not releasing the data because it weakens the case for booster shots in certain demographics.
Two weeks ago, the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65.
But the agency, led by Dr Rochelle Walensky, did not share the information on those aged 18-49, who are considered to be the least likely to benefit from a booster.
The 18-49 year old age group is considered least likely to benefit from the booster, given that death rates among the age group are already low. It is far more likely for the elderly and immunocompromised to get sick without their booster than healthy young and middle aged people.
Boosters became available for children aged 12 and upwards only last month, and so would not be covered by the dataset.
As of Monday, 65 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated.
There were 103,150 new cases reported nationwide, on a seven day rolling average – a dramatic decrease from January, when there were regularly over 700,000 new cases a day.
Outraged scientists stressed that publishing the data went hand in hand with educating the public about vaccines – explaining that as more people are vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated people who are infected or hospitalized would also rise.
They urged the CDC to publish the information.
Dr Paul Offit urged the CDC to ‘tell the truth, present the data’
‘Tell the truth, present the data,’ said Dr Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration.
‘I have to believe that there is a way to explain these things so people can understand it.’
He noted that, because the CDC had not published the information, American scientists were forced to rely on Israeli data.
‘There’s no reason that they should be better at collecting and putting forth data than we were,’ he said.
‘The CDC is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them.’
Another expressed shock that the CDC had the data at all.
‘We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,’ said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran the Covid Tracking Project, which brought together data on the pandemic for a website they ran until March 2021.
She denied that there was a risk of the data being misinterpreted, adding that it instead ‘builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.’
She added: ‘It gets really exhausting when you see the private sector working faster than the premier public health agency of the world.’
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