CDC is refusing to publish data it has collected on booster effectiveness for 33 MILLION Americans aged 18-49 over fears it might show the vaccines as ineffective: FDA expert tells CDC to 'tell the truth'

 

Two weeks ago the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published data about the effectiveness of boosters against COVID-19 

The CDC failed to publish a tranche of their data, however - omitting the impact on those aged 18-49, who are least likely to benefit from boosters 

The CDC are also being criticized for failing to publish their information about child hospitalization rates and comorbidities 

A spokeswoman for the CDC said they were concerned that the data would be misinterpreted, pointing out that it was incomplete and not verified 

Critics said that it was always better to publish the information rather than withhold, and allow scientists to analyze and explain what they could 

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. '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.

GRTWT.