The CDC — which is withholding information — has a hidden agenda

By Marty Makary, MD, MPH (a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine)

People say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a messaging problem. But the CDC’s problem is not messaging — it’s issuing flawed guidance while covering up the data.

Case in point: pushing boosters for young people.

After the Food and Drug Administration inexplicably bypassed its expert advisory committee to authorize boosters for all young people, the CDC director overruled her own experts’ down vote of the boosters-for-all proposal. That’s the magic of a call from the White House. Two top FDA officials, including the agency’s vaccine center head, quit over White House pressure to authorize boosters for the young.

But after the FDA and CDC rammed through the recommendation, they made sure the public wouldn’t see the real-world data. Despite repeated pleas to release all its data, the CDC only posted stats on boosters in people over age 50.

What have they been hiding? As a proxy, let’s take a look at what the CDC just published on people 50 to 65: For the fully vaccinated, the booster reduces the risk of COVID death from 4 per million to 1 per million. Who are those three helped by a booster? They’re not healthy people. One study of breakthrough hospitalizations found 75% had at least four comorbidities.

So the three people age 50 to 65 per million saved by a booster are almost certainly immunosuppressed individuals, a subgroup for whom boosters have long been recommended. Of course, the CDC doesn’t disclose what medical conditions those few who died had — it only has 21,000 employees to collect that information.

We once again have to look overseas for reliable data. An Israeli population study in the New England Journal of Medicine compared boosted vs. nonboosted people with the primary vaccine series. The risk of COVID death among nonboosted people under age 30 was zero — the same as it was among boosted.

A note for college administrators enforcing booster mandates: You can’t reduce a mortality risk of zero any lower with a booster.

The CDC claims it didn’t release booster data because it feared the information would be misinterpreted. No, it’s because the stats don’t support its agenda. Yet public health officials continue to beclown themselves by demanding all Americans over age 12 get boosted.

Most of the media have fallen for it. Throughout the pandemic, the New York Times and other outlets have only sourced doctors on the establishment groupthink bandwagon, dangled fear to young people and blindly amplified every edict government doctors fed without asking questions, just as the press did with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

We’ve seen medical bandwagon thinking hurt us before. The dogma that COVID spreads by surface transmission, children must be shut out of school and the barbaric separation of Americans from their dying loved ones. Our public health leaders continue to make critical mistakes and affirm each other with groupthink while journalists give them a megaphone to broadcast their agenda, unchecked, failing to ask basic questions, like: Where’s the supporting data? What’s the incidence of myocarditis after a booster in young people?

This week, one Times reporter finally picked up on what many of us have been saying about the CDC’s deception.

Similarly, the CDC put out two highly flawed studies to promote mask mandates. Now the last people in America required to cover their faces are children, waiters, waitresses, servers, and staff — people who are powerless.

The American people are hungry for honesty. They see the inequity of COVID policies and want the data straight, not politically curated by a small group of like-minded scientists.

If I were advising President Biden, I would tell him the CDC needs to restore public trust by making all its data available to researchers in real time. It’s time we end secret data laboratories in government.

The American people realize public health officials have been lying to them. A response to a national health emergency should warrant more data transparency, not less.

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Natural Immunity Denialism Responsible for Needless COVID-19 Discrimination, Job Losses

In a superb opinion piece in The Hill on Feb. 3, Drs. Jeffrey Klausner and Noah Kojima lauded the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for finally recognizing that naturally acquired immunity to COVID-19 is superior to that induced through vaccination.

That was the undeniable conclusion of a study conducted in California and New York.

Understandably, as medical professionals, the authors did not take the extra step of blaming the CDC for nearly two years of botched policy.

Instead, they explained that the new report “finally acknowledges what many have suspected for a long time—that surviving COVID-19 provides excellent natural immunity not only [to] repeat infection, but also to hospitalization and death for the delta variant of COVID-19.”

Klausner and Kojima are too generous. The scientific fact of naturally acquired immunity has not merely been “suspected” for some time. It was well-established through numerous rigorous, large-scale studies, including—but not limited to—one from the Cleveland Clinic (last June), another from Israel (last August), and a third from Qatar (last December), all of which confirm what humans have known for centuries; namely, recovering from a viral infection confers (often long-lasting) immunity.

Instead of incorporating this incontrovertible evidence into its COVID-19 vaccination guidance and recommending that recovered individuals should be exempt from mandates, for months the CDC doubled down on its false mantra that vaccine-induced immunity is superior to that following recovery from the virus, so everyone should get the vaccine.

It has done this through sleight of hand. Because vaccination may slightly elevate the levels of antibodies in COVID-19-recovered individuals for a brief period, the agency has run misleading headlines, claiming that certain studies prove even the naturally immune should get the vaccine.

But as many scientists have noted, this transient antibody boosting does not necessarily equate to a clinical benefit. In other words, it may not result in more robust immunity, and regardless, any increase is negligible.

Furthermore, the insistence upon recommending vaccination in this context does not account for potential adverse side effects.

Many naturally immune individuals—especially younger people—may reasonably conclude that the risk of, for example, myocarditis outweighs any marginal benefit for them.

The CDC’s refusal to change its stance despite voluminous evidence has led to real-world harm.

First, it has negatively impacted millions of naturally immune people in the United States because employers and governments enforcing mandates have refused to exempt them from vaccine requirements.

Many individuals with naturally acquired immunity lost their jobs, suffered discrimination, or suffered mental distress as a result of being coerced into receiving an unnecessary medical procedure.

These ill-conceived policies have, in a sick irony, led some states to permit health care workers currently infected with COVID-19 to treat patients, due to employee shortages resulting from termination of workers who declined the vaccine—many of whom possess natural immunity and thus were safer employees to have around.

Second, the CDC’s inexplicable natural immunity denialism has sown distrust in public health.

Americans caught on to the deceptive tactics that the agency was wielding in its push to vaccinate everyone.

As a lawyer challenging vaccine mandates in court, I speak to many individuals who have naturally acquired immunity and legitimate concerns about receiving the vaccine unnecessarily.

For instance, one young man about 30 years of age, who had been vaccinated in the spring, then caught COVID-19 in December. His employer, New York University, insisted that he get the booster.

Given his age and the potential myocarditis risk, along with his recent recovery, he determined that a booster was not in his interests. He faces loss of a job he worked hard for years to obtain.

Just days ago, Paul Offit, one of the country’s most zealous vaccine advocates, described the CDC’s meeting in which the decision was made to recommend that natural immunity not be recognized as equivalent to that attained through vaccination.

Offit explained that this approach, at odds with the science, was advocated for by Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins and was “bureaucratic more than anything else.”

Perhaps Fauci and Collins did not foresee the social and economic upheaval that would result from their natural immunity denialism.

Regardless, their refusal to follow the science and the elevation of bureaucratic concerns above all else have greatly diminished the public’s trust.

If the CDC is to have any chance of recovering its reputation and credibility, it must acknowledge its error immediately, recommend that anyone who has COVID-19 antibodies be exempt from any vaccine mandates, apologize to the American people (especially those who have lost their jobs) for what it has done to them, and encourage employers to hire back employees (and schools to reenroll students) with natural immunity.

Employers and others must stop treating nonbinding guidance as gospel. As the CDC has proven, agencies are fallible.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/02/17/natural-immunity-denialism-is-responsible-for-needless-covid-19-discrimination-job-losses

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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