A top U.S. agency is under fire for withholding some of the COVID-19 data it collects.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed to The Epoch Times that it has not published some of the data it collected on COVID-19 reinfections.
The spokesperson said it dropped plans for publishing a paper based on the data “given other response priorities” because a part of the same data was already presented in a published manuscript.
An agency representative told the New York Times that it has also withheld other information, including details on how booster doses have affected young people.
The data has not been released or has been released slowly because it takes time to make sure “it’s accurate and actionable,” the representative said, adding that there are fears the information might be misinterpreted.
Multiple experts say the CDC should make all the data available.
Dr. Robert Malone, who helped create the messenger RNA technology some of the vaccines are built on, says the CDC’s actions are a type of fraud.
“Withholding data, key data, is scientific fraud,” Malone told The Epoch Times.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, said that the CDC shouldn’t “withhold information in order to manipulate behavior.”
The agency should “help Americans understand the data in context and provide guidance to improve the lives of all Americans,” he wrote on Twitter.
Paul Mango, a former official at the CDC’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the CDC’s role should be collecting and disseminating data, not analyzing it itself.
“The CDC just doesn’t have the capacity to conduct research as quickly as the pandemic is moving,” Mango told The Epoch Times.
As one example, the Cleveland Clinic has since mid-2021 been publishing papers on the natural immunity many of its employees enjoy after recovering from COVID-19. The CDC didn’t publish a major study on the subject until January.
“I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than having 1,000 different people look at the data—scientists researcher, epidemiologists—and all interpret it. I hope they would interpret some of it differently, to tell you the truth. I think that would stimulate the right debate over things,” Mango added.
Mango, whose book on his time with
The CDC has been collecting data on so-called breakthrough infections, or COVID-19 cases among the vaccinated, a spokesperson told the New York Times, but hasn’t published the figures because people may interpret them as the vaccines not performing effectively—the same reason given by Scottish health officials recently in halting the publication of some data.
The continued collection surprised Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist who helped run the COVID Tracking Project. “We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” she told the paper, adding that an analysis of the data “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”
By Zachary Stieber and Petr Svab
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