Most notably, the agency withheld granular information about hospitalizations broken down by age, race, and vaccination because it feared that the public would misinterpret the data, an official told the publication.

HAWAII AND PUERTO RICO ARE THE LAST HOLDOUTS ON MASK MANDATES

It also did not make public information about the effectiveness of booster shots for adults under age 65. Without the safety and efficacy data of boosters in that age group, federal vaccine experts relied on data out of Israel.

“There’s no reason that [the Israeli scientists] should be better at collecting and putting forth data than we were,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician specializing in infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The CDC is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them.”

The agency has also fallen under scrutiny over the past year due to its failure to publish data on cases of reinfection, when a person is fully vaccinated but still gets infected, unless the person is hospitalized or dies.

Agency spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund, who spoke with the New York Times, said the CDC has been slow to put out the streams of data “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time” and the public could misconstrue it.

Nordlund added that the agency’s data on COVID-19 vaccines represent only 10% of the population of the U.S., the same amount that represents the annual flu vaccine uptake. Healthcare providers were outraged to hear that the data on COVID-19 shots were not made public.

“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist who helped run the COVID Tracking Project, which compiled pandemic metrics until March 2021.

The CDC has also recently launched a dashboard for publicly tracking data on the wastewater surveillance system, heralded as a valuable tool to detect the amount of virus circulating in the community. Some states and municipalities had already been supplying the CDC with their wastewater surveillance data, but it was not made available to the public until very recently.

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The CDC also has a bureaucratic network that must sign off on all decisions regarding COVID-19 data to be made public. CDC officials must alert the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency’s parent entity, which must also alert the White House.

“The CDC is a political organization as much as it is 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 co