A report showing the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccine and previously delayed by the head of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, reports The Washington Post.
The document showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalisations among healthy adults by about half this past winter, but is unlikely to see the light of day, according to three sources familiar with the decision.
The move, which has not been previously reported, has raised concerns among current and former officials that information about the vaccine’s benefits is being downplayed because it conflicts with the views of Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has been an outspoken critic of the shots.
Kennedy’s vaccine agenda had received pointed questioning from lawmakers during budget hearings last week.
The Washington Post reported two weeks ago that Jay Bhattacharya, who is temporarily overseeing the CDC, delayed publication of the report over concerns about methodology. The report had been scheduled for publication on 19 March in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
However, the decision was made not to publish the report, according to confidential sources.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services which oversees the CDC, confirmed the delay two weeks ago. At that time, he said it was “routine for CDC leadership to review and flag concerns about MMWR papers, especially relating to their methodology, leading up to planned publication”.
Nixon said that Bhattacharya had raised concerns about “the observational method used in the study to calculate vaccine effectiveness” and that the scientific team was working to address them.
Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, is leading the CDC while Erica Schwartz, a top health official during President Donald Trump’s first term, awaits Senate confirmation.
Last week, Nixon described the decision differently: “The MMWR’s editorial assessment identified concerns regarding the methodological approach to estimating vaccine effectiveness, and the manuscript was not accepted for publication,” a characterisation that differs from accounts by people familiar with the report’s review.
The report had cleared the agency’s scientific-review process, which includes dozens of scientists, according to sources, while stopping an MMWR report at that stage is highly unusual, noted former CDC officials.
Bhattacharya apparently had concerns about a methodology that has long been used by the CDC to evaluate vaccine effectiveness for respiratory viruses, including influenza.
A report about flu vaccine effectiveness this past winter, using the same methodology, was published in the MMWR a week earlier. An HHS official had previously said Bhattacharya was not in a position to review the earlier study and would have raised the same concerns anyway.
A report using this methodology to gauge Covid vaccine effectiveness in children was published in MMWR in December.
The methodology was also used in a 2021 study on Covid vaccine effectiveness in clinics and hospitals published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Vaccine effectiveness estimates using the same methodology have also been published in other peer-reviewed journals, including JAMA Network Open and The Lancet.
An HHS official said that Bhattacharya had held a meeting with scientific staff and that the report’s authors did not want to adjust their methodology.
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