The Great Data Revealing

From The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects by Apoorva Mandavilli.  The subheading is The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses.

One of my main, among many, criticism of the CDC since the beginning of the pandemic has been that it was unprepared and failed to provide strong definitional guidelines and failed to have in place the measurement and reporting mechanisms necessary to monitor and respond to an unknown and little understood public health emergency.

We have ended up having to rely more on Scottish, British, Swedish, Danish and Israeli data because the American data has been bad, absent or both.  

The ill-preparedness to provide clear definitions and to execute effective and reliable systems of measurement and monitoring is a key indicator validating the pre-pandemic criticism that the CDC had become sclerotic and suffered from mission creep into social policy at the expense of actual disease control.  Two years on, the CDC seems still incapable of understanding empirically the state of Covid-19.

Or maybe not.  The New York Times is reporting that the CDC has been collecting the data, it just has not been releasing that data.  My suspicion is that they probably have been collecting data, and it may be better than what has been public, but that the default assumption must be that the new data is still probably definitionally flawed and inadequate in its comprehensiveness.  The article says as much.

What interested me was the refrain through the article that the CDC had not been releasing the data because it might be misinterpreted.  

Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Ms. Nordlund said.

[snip]

But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

[snip]

But the experts dismissed the potential misuse or misinterpretation of data as an acceptable reason for not releasing it.

“We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” Ms. Rivera said.

This strikes me as bureaucratic ass-covering.  We are now aware of the gap between the CDC claims and the data from the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Israel.  

It would seem that the legitimate concern is that the CDC data won't support the policies which have been followed and therefore will further weaken the reputation of the CDC.  

That the establishment mainstream media New York Times is now willing to report that which many have claimed since 2020 is a sign of the great revealing occurring.  The CDC failed.  The government policies were foolish, ill-founded, and destructive.  Science has played backseat to political expedience for the duration of the pandemic.

All of that is likely true and it is that likely truth which has stood in the way of doing things the scientific way and making all data available to everyone.