Mike the Mad Biologist

Well, TEH FREEDOMZ didn’t last too long (boldface mine):

A report showing the efficacy of the covid-19 vaccine that was previously delayed by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been blocked from being published in the agency’s flagship scientific journal, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The report showed that the vaccine reduced emergency department visits and hospitalizations among healthy adults by about half this past winter.

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 they conflict with the views of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has been an outspoken critic of the shots. Kennedy’s vaccine agenda has received pointed questioning from lawmakers during budget hearings that began last week and conclude Wednesday.

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 March 19 in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

In recent days, a decision was made that the report would not be published, according to two of the people who spoke to The Post….

On Tuesday, 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 characterization that differs from accounts by people familiar with the report’s review…

Bhattacharya 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.

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, the Lancet and Pediatrics.

Freedom for me, but not for thee. And it is the height of arrogance for Bhattacharya to think that he, along with a plucky few iconclasts, have discovered a fatal flaw with the test-negative study design*. And at the upcoming NAS symposium where a bunch of COVID (and public health) contrarians will be speaking, I hope someone asks them about this.

Of course, this is part of a larger agenda to reduce vaccination by calling into question the efficacy of the vaccines, with the idea being that vaccines are supposedly harmful, and they only protect at high risk populations. It’s just pseudoscientific bullshit all the way down.

*In a test-negative design study, the efficacy of the vaccine is evaluated by examining a pool of people with symptoms, and then determining if they actually have the disease (e.g., they might just have a bad respiratory infection that is not due to COVID). Then the vaccination rates between those with COVID and those without are compared. What vaccine denialists typically argue is that, if healthy people were recruited and followed, as was done initially for the COVID vaccines, there would be little effect, as healthy übermenschen don’t need no stinkin’ vaccine, while the genetic underclass does because healthy people gain very little from vaccination (even though with COVID vaccines, that was not the case). What this sort of requirement would do is make most vaccines that need to be updated annually nearly impossible to test in time. Because they are fucking evil people.

Defense Secretary Hegseth, unaware that one of the key reforms George Washington enacted while commanding the Continental Army was to institute a smallpox inoculation program, let it rip with this policy brain fart (boldface mine):

The military will no longer require U.S. troops to receive the annual flu vaccine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Tuesday, rolling back what he described as an “overly broad” mandate that had been in place for seven decades.

“We’re seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our war-fighting capabilities,” Hegseth said in a video posted to his social media channels. “In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.”

Hegseth said that under a new policy, soldiers would be able to take the vaccine if they believed it was in their best interest, billing it as an effort to “restore freedom and strength to our joint force.”

“But we will not force you, because your body, your faith and your convictions are not negotiable,” he said…

The U.S. military first mandated the flu vaccine in 1945, at the end of World War II — in part to hedge against the threat of biological warfare and because the great influenza pandemic of 1918 to 1920 had crippled American troop readiness during World War I, killing more than 26,000 American soldiers. The mandate was briefly withdrawn in 1949 but reinstated in the 1950s.

It is as if the entire Trump administration is full of Michael Browns (of “Heckuva job Brownie” infamy), though that is arguably unfair to Michael Brown, since he was just unqualified, not delusionally stupid. Snark aside, it is clear that the Republican Party line regarding vaccination is that, while there might be some very sick people who benefit from vaccination, everyone else is more at risk from vaccination than from the disease itself, which is foolish. Influenza is not fun, and it is not just a cold.

Meanwhile, if you think HHS is going to step in here, yesterday HHS Secretary Kennedy talked about “cleaning up the risk pool”, so eugenics is back on the menu, boys!

But there were no differences between the two parties, amirite?