The “Trust the Science” official narrative has just taken another blow. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has kept reams of its COVID-related data under wraps for more than a year because it did not trust the public to interpret the information correctly (among other reasons), The New York Times reported Sunday.
Per the report,
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.
Among the data being withheld from Americans is a breakdown of COVID hospitalizations by age, race, and vaccination status. The agency also did not report on such findings as the efficacy of booster shots in 18- to 49-year-olds, “the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected,” even though it collected the information, said the article.
CDC spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund told the newspaper that the agency’s data priority has been to collect “accurate and actionable” information. Some of the data has been made public, she explained, because “it’s not yet ready for prime time,” presumably meaning that some portion of the information has not been properly verified.
Nordlund added that the “fear that the information might be misinterpreted” also influenced the CDC’s decision not to publicize all the data. An anonymous CDC official reiterated the concern: “The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.”
For example, when the delta strain of COVID arrived in the United States, the heavily vaccinated state of Massachusetts saw three-quarters of all fresh COVID infections occurring in fully vaccinated people. That fact could make people “mistakenly” conclude that “vaccines were powerless against the virus — validating the CDC’s concerns.”
In somewhat confusing verbiage, the article states that “that could have been avoided if the agency had educated the public from the start that as more people are vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated people who are infected or hospitalized would also rise, public health experts said.”
Huh? What kind of vaccine would see people who take it catching the virus and landing in the hospital? Well, the “leaky” kind that does not prevent transmission, obviously. By September 2021, the CDC had quietly admitted that the COVID shots used in America neither “prevent disease” nor “provide immunity.”
Another reason was the agency’s “outmoded” data systems, said Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s deputy director for public health science and surveillance.
While the CDC is currently “trying to modernize the systems,” right now it is simply “not up to handling large volumes of data,” the official added. The agency has already received a billion taxpayer dollars to upgrade its data systems, the report noted.
But even this funding may not help, since the nation’s top public-health agency takes its cues from politicians, the report revealed. While the Biden administration continuously reassures the public that it always “follows the science” and swears that it bases its policies on the “best scientific advice,” it actually influences the agency’s recommendations. In other words, currently in America, science follows politics, not the other way around.
The article continues,
The CDC also has multiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important publications, and its officials must alert the Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees the agency — and the White House of their plans.
This presumably means that the HHS (Department of Health and Human Services), as the CDC’s parent entity, and the White House, as the parent entity of the HHS, may, in fact, instruct the CDC on its data release.
Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, who also spoke with the outlet, put it simply. “The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” he said. (Emphasis added.) “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 C.D.C.”
Dr. Robert Malone, an original inventor of mRNA technology, blasted the agency for perpetuating a scientific fraud by keeping the crucial data secret. Referring to Scarpino’s comment, he wrote on his Substack account on Monday,
Basically, a non-governmental spokesperson for the “official” public health scientific community is throwing Rochelle [Walensky] under the bus, and saying that the politicians forced us to commit scientific fraud by withholding key data…. The government owes the American people a huge apology. People in the government who have lied to the American people need to be charged and must be held legally accountable. We the people must demand to see ALL of the data from the CDC and the FDA.
As recently as December 2021, speaking about the update on COVID isolation guidance, CDC Director Walensky seemed to make a Freudian slip by admitting that the agency’s guidance has been based on what the government perceived the public would accept:
“It really had a lot to do with what we thought people would be able to tolerate.”
