CDC criticized for clamps on vaccine data

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, has made only a minimal amount of data on COVID-19 vaccines publicly available, according to a news report.

In the report on Sunday headlined "The CDC Isn't Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects", The New York Times said the agency has "withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses" in the United States.

"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," the report states, citing people familiar with the data.

Earlier this month, when the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults aged under 65, it did not include numbers for 18-to-49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from the supplemental shots, the newspaper reported.

Kristen Nordlund, a CDC spokeswoman, said the agency has been slow to release the data "because basically, at the end of the day, it's not yet ready for prime time".

The Times said that the CDC also must alert the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Atlanta-based agency, and the White House of its plans.

Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation's Pandemic Prevention Institute, told the newspaper: "The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization. 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."

The agency faced criticism last year for not tracking breakthrough infections in vaccinated people, instead of focusing on those who were sick enough to be hospitalized or to die.

The CDC then presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely information on hospitalized patients according to age, sex, race and vaccination status, the Times reported.

The agency has been regularly gathering information since the vaccines were first available, according to a federal official, the Times reported. The agency has been hesitant to release those figures publicly, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective. Nordlund confirmed that to be the case.

"We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years," epidemiologist Jessica Malaty Rivera, who was on the team that ran the COVID Tracking Project, told the Times. "We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats."

Marty Makary, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, wrote in an opinion article for Fox News on Tuesday that "the American people are just hungry for honesty".

He added: "They want the data straight, not politically curated by a small group of like-minded scientists. If I were advising President Joe Biden, I would tell him that the CDC needs to restore the public trust by making all CDC data available in real-time for researchers around the country to access and to study."

When the Delta variant of COVID-19 caused an outbreak in Massachusetts last summer, the fact that three-quarters of those infected were vaccinated led people to prematurely conclude that the vaccines failed－validating the CDC's concerns about the misinterpretation of data, the Times reported.

As of Wednesday, the US had more than 78.6 million infections and more than 939,200 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Experts are warning of the spread of a new strain of the Omicron variant and potential health effects after infection, as major states in the country rushed to shed COVID-19 restrictions amid declines in cases and hospitalizations.

Experts estimate there might be millions of new-onset cardiac cases related to the virus, plus a worsening of the disease for many already affected.

"We are expecting a tidal wave of cardiovascular events in the coming years from direct and indirect causes of COVID," The Washington Post reported, citing Donald M.Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association.

Xinhua and agencies contributed to this story.