Public authorities in the United States and elsewhere dedicated themselves, in recently years, to the promotion of vaccination against COVID-19. Dissent to the vaccination campaign was crushed by statements from public figures. “They’re killing people”, President Biden told journalists on July 16, 2021, referring to those who did not receive COVID vaccination. Social media platforms did their part by banning users who criticized COVID vaccination. Federal workers, healthcare workers, military personnel, university students and many others were subjected to mandated COVID vaccination.
Those measures were justified because the vaccines worked; they provided protection against COVID-19, it was believed. Yet doubts about the effect of COVID vaccination against the disease are growing. That is certainly the case with studies of COVID vaccination conducted by the CDC through the program COVID-NET.
COVID-NET links hospitalization cases with positive COVID-19 test results and COVID-19 vaccination status. This allows for the estimation of the effects of COVID vaccination on hospitalization. Most recently, COVID-NET reported that COVID vaccination reduces the risk of hospitalization by a factor of 16.0. CDC Director, Rochelle Walenski cited results from COVID-NET to justify continued COVID vaccination at a press briefing on February 2, 2022:
“… only 12 percent of those age 65 and over remain unvaccinated in the general population. But when we look at those over the age of 65 who are in the hospital for COVID-19, 54 percent are unvaccinated.”
Nevertheless, the statistics provided by COVID-NET are controversial. While concerns have been reported about state immunization information systems, COVID-NET uses those records exclusively to determine the COVID vaccination status. That is stated explicitly here:
“State immunization information system data were linked to cases …”
That was confirmed in an email from contractor to COVID-NET, Arthur Reingold. He stated:
“Here in California, where inputting all COVID-19 vaccinations is mandatory and we think those administering the vaccine are highly compliant, we do rely on the state registry for vaccination status. I suppose a few individuals may have been vaccinated elsewhere and the vaccination never made it into the registry, but that is likely to be a tiny percentage of individuals and not bias estimates of vaccine effectiveness to any noticeable extent.”
What is remarkable is that COVID-NET performs more extensive searches to establish the vaccination status of the cases. In a prior email, this same contractor stated:
“For COVID-NET, we track down vaccination using diverse record sources, beyond whatever the individual says.”
In other words, COVID-NET performs a search for the COVID vaccination records beyond those available in the state immunization information systems but chooses to link hospitalization cases using only records from the state immunization information systems. Most significantly, COVID-NET requests that information from the patient him/herself but ignores the response.
This is an extraordinary development - the selective use of the immunization status records in the study of the effect of COVID vaccination on hospitalization. Although the contractor stated that the magnitude of the defects in the state immunization information records, are "likely to be a tiny percentage," it is not clear how he arrived at that conclusion. A simple reassurance has little meaning.
In any case, without a valid justification for disregarding parts of the vaccination status record, COVID-NET statistics should be considered suspect. CDC has deceived the country at every turn. There is absolutely no reason to give this organization any benefit of the doubt on its controversial decision to restrict the sources for the determination of COVID vaccination status.