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In recent days, a decision was made that the report would not be published, according to two of the people who spoke to The Post….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