The New York Times is reporting on Monday that the lack of information provided to the public about the COVID-19 pandemic is not the result of a lack of data but of a conscious decision by the “public health” weenies managing our national response to sandbag information that contradicts the approved narrative. Given the Branch Covidian syle of fearmongering about the pandemic that has emanated from the New York Times over the past two years, the article is shocking both in substance and in tone.
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.
When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected.
The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings.
Two full years into the pandemic, 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.
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.
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Another reason is fear that the information might be misinterpreted, [Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the C.D.C.] said.
Throughout this “pandemic,” information has been used as a weapon to prevent any effective critique of the bizarre actions imposed upon us by those claiming to have some unique knowledge about keeping us safe.
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.
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.
In short:
As I pointed out last week in my post, No Government Can Make as Many Mistakes and Errors About COVID as Ours Did; It Requires Intent, it has been evident for a while that the public health decisions made by the government are driven by motives other than public health. Do we really think it is an oversight that the studies undergirding the mask mandates are so craptacular that no one will defend them? Do we really believe that we have no effective way of tracking what appears to be an epidemic of myocarditis among young adults who have elected or been forced to take the vaccine? Do we really believe the Department of Defense published inaccurate data for five consecutive years and only got the numbers right last year (Thanks to Politifact for Keeping Us All From Panicking About Adverse Vaccine-Related Events in the Armed Forces)?
The bottom line is that you can’t believe anything they tell you because they will only release information that supports their conclusions.
The point I’ve made since the first days of this insanity is that the fundamental objectives in this exercise are the erosion of civil liberties (for instance, church attendance forbidden and the president of the United States urging media platforms to censor content at odds with official statements) and the conditioning of a large swath of the population to do what the government tells them without any independent discernment (mask on-mask off-mask on; vaccine passport; wear masks outside). These objectives are only attainable if all information is tightly controlled and, when released, required to be interpreted in the way the government determines is correct.
Quite honestly, the CDC and HHS can’t be trusted to interpret the data correctly because those agencies are concerned about money and power. They don’t care if we live or die because they get paid the same amount of money no matter the outcome. They are hostile to civil liberties because they want to be obeyed. What makes this worse is that no one in the White House objects to what is going on, so nothing will change.