The influence of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grew exponentially since March 2020 when COVID made landfall. 330 million Americans were introduced to their new data overlords, scientist superstars Dr. Anthony Fauci and CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
They “had the answers.”
Despite constant flip flopping in the name of “following the science,” we believed them. They wore lab coats, afterall, and they crunched numbers all day —deep diving into COVID data they would later share with Americans (and Senate Committees). We locked down and isolated; we skipped birthdays and holidays; we stopped learning and smiling.
We stopped living. The Guardian proclaimed Fauci the “sexiest man alive” and we, Americans, the freest of all the world’s peoples, enslaved ourselves. Sounds kind of insane, right?
But it was all in the name of data. Unfortunately, and quite predictably, we’re now learning that the crackerjack squad over at the CDC didn’t really share all the data —in fact, we only got a fraction.
According to a new report from the New York Times, “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.”
“Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control. Detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk. Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots. And wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early,” NYT continues.
Oh. THAT data. That seems like a significant omission.
“Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, said the agency has been slow to release the different streams of data ‘because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.’ She said the agency’s ‘priority when gathering any data is to ensure that it’s accurate and actionable.’”
“Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted,” Nordlund added.
This data hoarding is unacceptable and detrimental to the research of other scientists cranking away in COVID arena.
“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” epidemiologist for the former Covid Tracking Project Jessica Malaty Rivera said. A better analysis “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”
Trust takes decades to build and just one pandemic to ruin. According to a recent NBC News Poll, less than half of Americans (44%) trust what the CDC has said about COVID.
Let’s see how long it takes for that number to get back up above 50% —or, more likely, how quickly it dips below 40.
