Apoorva Mandavilli, who wrote The New York Times' CDC piece published February 21, was the 2019 winner of the Victor Kohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Reporting. She has won many other awards and was moderator for the American Museum of Natural History's June 2020 symposium on Covid-19 origins and spread. She has been immersed in all things Covid since the beginning of the pandemic.
I'm going to go through Mandavilli's piece line by line and comment on those elements I find most troubling. Rather than being mega-shrill, I will once again don my Dragnet Joe Friday persona and save most of my pontificating for another day.
First Paragraph:
Mandavilli writes, "For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for COVID-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race, and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public."
My response, upon reading the first sentence, was great, there is fairly complete demographic information that is available. After reading the second sentence, I felt a knot in my stomach and thought, "Uh oh." Because if the info bolstered the preferred storylines, the information would almost assuredly be publicly available. How bad is the missing data going to be? I steeled myself.
Second Paragraph (And I Cringe):
"When the CDC published the first significant data two weeks ago on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65, it left out numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18-to-49-year-olds, the group the data showed was least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected."
I was flabbergasted by this. I really did not know what to do with it. Of course, the first question that popped into my head was, "Why?" Even if the CDC announced to the public that it was skipping data for 18-to-49, would public comments in the media about booster effectiveness continually mention that 18-to-49-year-olds were not included? Highly unlikely. The reporting on booster effectiveness would be labeled as "adults younger than 65," and the fact that the majority of data was withheld would not be mentioned in the usual news blurbs.
So I did my own math (as I occasionally do). The 18-to-49 U.S. population is 138 million people. The 50-to-64 share is 63 million. Thus, when touting "booster effectiveness," the CDC decided to eliminate 69% of the data. Being a cynical bloke, I of course think that not including 69% of the data was in service of a narrative.
I was horrified, but since I'm in Joe Friday mode, I will comment no further on my horror. Suffice it to say that I raised an eyebrow and choked a bit on my coffee.
You can't just quote booster effectiveness numbers for "adults under 65" and leave out the "18-to-49-year-old" data. A college freshman doing that in a lab course would get a big fat "F." No government agency should ever pull something like that, unless we're talking 1930's Soviet Union. The United States CDC left out the bulk of available data to make a better case for the effectiveness of boosters. Hard to believe.
Paragraph Six:
"Without the booster data for 18-to-49-year-olds, the outside experts whom federal health agencies look to for advice had to rely on numbers from Israel to make their recommendations on the shots."
Well, at least these "outside experts" knew most data was missing, even if the American public wasn't informed.
Paragraph Eight:
"Another reason (for not releasing data) is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, Nordlund said."
That's Kristen Nordlund, a spokesperson for the CDC. If the CDC is concerned that information might be misinterpreted, I don't think purposefully misrepresenting data is really the way to fix that.
Paragraph 12:
"'The CDC is a political organization as much as a public health organization," said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation's Pandemic Prevention Institute. '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 CDC.'"
I'm glad Mandavilli got Scarpino to say one of the quiet parts out loud.
Paragraph 13:
"The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the CDC has made public."
As I have been emphasizing in the "Propaganda Files," what is missing often tells you more than what's presented. Once you recognize what's missing, you can theorize about WHY it's missing.
Paragraph 14:
"Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race, and vaccination status."
I have commented many times on the curious media strategy of providing statistical context for survival of the vaccinated but not for survival of the unvaccinated. The above paragraph frames similar problems. These problems also tie into the change in definition over time for the phrase "vaccine efficacy," which at the start of the pandemic referred to the ability of vaccine to prevent infection but has morphed into the ability of vaccine to prevent hospitalization and death.
From Paragraph 15:
"But the CDC has been routinely collecting information since the COVID-19 vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make these figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective."
First, note that this is another example of the quiet part being said out loud, this time by a "federal official" who unsurprisingly prefers to remain anonymous.
How the public interprets or doesn't interpret data is absolutely no excuse to withhold data. Withholding data allegedly in service of some "public good" is incredibly arrogant. What, we rubes won't properly interpret the data? So we have no right to it?
Quietly withholding key statistics from the public in service of institutional goals is flat-out propaganda.
Paragraph 25:
Mandavilli writes, "'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.'"
One would hope so. And God bless Dr. Offit.
Conclusion
What the CDC has done by withholding and mislabeling data has consequences. The most obvious consequence is that it absolutely undermines the wavering confidence Americans have in the CDC. I'll tackle the unstated aspects of Mandavilli's piece next time.
Bob Dietz
February 24, 2022
