https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-breakthrough-vaccine-natural-immunity-cdc-fauci-biden-failure-11631548306?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
Dr. Makary is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and the author of “The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care—And How To Fix It.”
The U.S. spends lavishly on healthcare yet can’t answer basic questions about Covid-19. Some of the best research has come from Israel. American public health agencies should be producing data on breakthrough infections, boosters and natural immunity. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has failed to provide the information needed to inform a sound Covid strategy.
Israel began its vaccine rollout with Pfizer in December, only days after the U.S. But Israel kept good data, reported them out frequently and quickly, and used them to track subsequent Covid infections. When the White House announced its plan to recommend a booster shot for all Americans, it cited Israeli data. The World Health Organization and others criticized the plan, calling the evidence insufficient, and in what seemed like a coordinated protest, two top scientists at the Food and Drug Administration abruptly resigned.
The Biden administration recently got the supporting data it needed to justify its booster plan. But not from the CDC. Another Israeli study showed that a booster resulted in a 10-fold reduction in severe Covid illness in people over 60. The results were published mere weeks after the study’s completion, not months later as often happens in the U.S.
“There’s no doubt,” Anthony Fauci said of the findings in a press briefing, “from the dramatic data from the Israeli study that the boosts that are being now done there and contemplated here support very strongly the rationale for such an approach.” The FDA, trying to evaluate the question of boosters, scrambled to obtain the raw data from Israel.
The bigger question is: Why didn’t the CDC produce the research?
