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Amid growing criticism, CDC denies withholding vaccination data on COVID deaths, hospitalizations
While the agency emphasizes COVID vaccines and boosters substantially reduce hospitalizations and deaths, its own data are more complicated.
By Greg Piper
Updated: March 29, 2022 - 10:56pm
For the first time since COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed, the CDC finds itself under sustained scrutiny from even presumed allies for the quality and timeliness of data it publishes and what it keeps hidden.
The agency recently removed tens of thousands of deaths attributed to COVID through a "coding logic error," including a quarter of pediatric deaths.
The CDC has only published "a tiny fraction" of its collected data, from booster performance in prime-age adults to "hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status," sources told The New York Times.
One reason is fear the data could be misrepresented, including on vaccine effectiveness, agency spokesperson Kristen Nordlund told the newspaper. Scottish public health officials gave the same rationale when the country stopped reporting COVID deaths by vaccination status last month.
Newly released public records show the agency refusing to share its "demographic vaccine data at the state level" a year ago, instead directing a Harvard public health researcher to see if the CDC's "state and jurisdictional partners" post the data on their website.
Even as the agency works to unify federal and state public health data systems through its Data Modernization Initiative, some critics have accused the CDC of actively squelching statistics that undermine its preferred narratives...