REVEALED: CDC has published only a fraction of COVID-19 data it has collected

Several people familiar with the data told the The New York Times that the CDC, the leading agency in the country’s public health emergency response, has unveiled only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected regarding the virus over the last two years.

Most recently, the CDC published its first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 years of age, but withheld the data for those 18-to-49, a group least likely to benefit from the booster, and a large number of the US population.

Much of the data withheld by the agency could help local and state governments better target their efforts to control the spread of the virus, with data targeting different populations helping officials target those most at risk.

"Information on hospitalizations and death by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots," The New York Times reported.

Instead, outside experts had to look elsewhere for data, namely Israel, to make their recommendation on the vaccine.

"There’s no reason that they should be better at collecting and putting forth data than we were," Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, said of Israeli scientists. "The CDC is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them."

Offit noted that relying on outside data for booster recommendation is less than ideal, with Israel defining severe disease differently than the US, amongst other issues.

A spokeswoman for the CDC, Kristen Nordlund, 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."

Nordlund noted that another reason this data hasn’t been released is over fears of misinterpretation.

"We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats," Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, said.

Despite concerns over misinformation, some public health experts say that the data should be released, and the public informed about what this data means.

"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."

Nordland said that one of the reasons that the data has not been widely published is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population in the US, but according to the The New York Times, the CDC has relied on such a level of sampling to track influenza for years.

"We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years," said Rivera. A detailed analysis, she said, "builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on."

Another issue with the CDC unveiled by the pandemic is its outdated systems that cannot handle the large amounts of data coming in.

"We want better, faster data that can lead to decision making and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate the lag in data that has held us back," Dr. Daniel Jernigan, the agency’s deputy director for public health science and surveillance, said.

It has also been difficult to find CDC data regarding the number of children hospitalized for the virus that have other medical conditions, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Committee on Infectious Diseases.

According to the The New York Times, "The academy’s staff asked their partners at the CDC for that information on a call in December, according to a spokeswoman for the AAP, and were told it was unavailable."

"They’ve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us," she said. "I mean, you can’t find out anything from them."