U.S. health officials have stopped the publication of a study on whether the COVID-19 vaccine was keeping adults from becoming sick enough to have to go to the hospital.
A U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman on Wednesday confirmed the decision to halt publication, citing a dispute about the study’s methodology.
The research paper was to appear in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s flagship publication.
One way scientists have studied COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness is by focusing on sick people who were admitted to hospitals or visited emergency rooms. The researchers check whether patients were vaccinated and then calculate the odds of a positive COVID-19 test among vaccinated patients vs. those who were unvaccinated.
Papers using that methodology have been published — after review by experts in the field — in a number of esteemed journals, including Pediatrics and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Following the same approach, the new study concluded that the vaccine cut ER visits and hospitalizations among otherwise healthy adults by about half this past winter, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the cancellation.
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HHS officials did not say exactly why that methodology was a problem in this instance but argued that prior infection, behavior and differences in who seeks care can affect results.
The wider scientific community does not have those concerns and many researchers have used the approach, said Dr. Fiona Havers, an Atlanta-based doctor who previously worked at CDC. The methodology is built to address differences related to who seeks care, and prior infection shouldn’t be much of an issue because so many Americans have been infected by the coronavirus, she added.
No study design is perfect, but HHS officials haven’t proposed an alternative “that’s realistic and ethical for getting real-time estimates of how well vaccines are working each year,” said Havers, who once led a CDC hospital network surveillance team that focused on COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
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During President Donald Trump’s first administration, public health advocates worried that political appointees were trying to control what was being published in the MMWR.
Those concerns returned last year, when Trump returned to office and publication of the MMWR was temporarily suspended. It returned, but has remained a thinner version of its former self.
“Health care professionals rely on the MMWR for timely, objective and fact-based information about the nation’s public health,” said U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who voiced concern when CDC communications were halted last year.
“Muzzling scientists and doctors on how to prevent Americans from being hospitalized can have deadly consequences. The CDC must abandon plans to place a political gag order on this critical research,” Durbin said in a statement Wednesday.
The vaccine wasn’t effective as they tried to make it out to be, that’s why it’s being withheld.
The contract that the Canadian government signed with Pfizer. It clearly says they had no idea of efficacy or side effects yet the government lied to us all any ruined many peoples lives.
Nobody was held accountable and we all just moved on to the next fabricated crisis, then the next…
Oh, give it a rest already. What efficacy?!? They lied from the start, and duped the gullible sheep into getting this clotshot while covering up the facts of it being ineffective in stopping infection and transmission.
Biden’s “winter of death” was a shameless fear mongering. Many people lost way more than their jobs. Many died FROM this injection. Millions are still suffering the side effects and are denied compensation.
The only people who benefitted are the CDC, Walenski, Fauci and the rest of Pharma shills.
There actually is a privately created website called howbad.info where you can trace the batch number of your injection to see the real statistics of the side effects including death.
It also includes a very recent info on HPV Jan’s induction of infertility and MS. Cases as reported in VAERS and EUDRA.
I hate global! I posted two absolutely truthful comments and they deleted them, again!
Global propaganda machine does not allow the truth.
CDC is a joke. Covid is over. The only people who are getting flu vaccines are hypochondriacs or elderly (who are coerced). Most people do not need to go to the hospital for a simple case of the flu. Unless the flu shot is targeted at the flu that one is exposed to, it does nothing. – that is science. Of course any exposure to a virus stimulates the bodies natural immune system. However to say that a vaccine reduces severity is just wrong.
Covid was a scam, and the “vaccines” were neither safe nor effective. The latter hurt or killed a lot of people who were unlucky enough to not get the placebo.
I thought Canada wasn’t interested in any CDC study done in the USA. So why is this news.