CDC slow to share data on need for booster shots

By Marginal Revolution.

"When Pfizer representatives met with senior U.S. government health officials on July 12, they laid out why they thought booster shots would soon be necessary in the United States. Data from Israel showed the vaccine’s effectiveness waned over time, especially in older and immunocompromised people.

But officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disagreed, saying their own data showed something quite different, according to four people with direct knowledge of the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Other senior health officials in the meeting were stunned. Why hadn’t the CDC looped other government officials on the data? Could the agency share it — at least with the Food and Drug Administration, which was responsible for deciding whether booster shots were necessary? But CDC officials demurred, saying they planned to publish it soon.

That episode, say senior administration officials and outside experts, illustrates the growing frustration with the CDC’s slow and siloed approach to sharing data, which prevented officials across the government from getting real-time information about how the delta variant was bearing down on the United States and behaving with greater ferocity than earlier variants — an information gap they say stymied the response…

“It’s not acceptable how long it takes for this data to be made available,” said a senior CDC official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. “It’s done in a very academic way. Cross every ‘t,’ and dot every ‘i,’ and unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury in a global pandemic. There’s going to be a need to have a significant cultural shift in the agency.”

Here is the full Washington Post story by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Lena H. Sun."