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Some officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are said to disagree with the public health agency’s base for overturning its face mask guidelines, saying the data behind the review is flawed or skewed.
What is the background?
The CDC reversed its mask guidelines last week, citing a spike in COVID-19 cases it attributes to the Delta variant. While CDC guidelines said fully vaccinated individuals did not have to wear face masks indoors, the CDC now says even fully vaccinated Americans in areas with high COVID-19 transmission rates should hide.
Meanwhile, the CDC released data which officials say shows fully vaccinated people spread COVID-19 as easily as unvaccinated people, indicating data that allegedly showed similar levels of viral load in people. vaccinated and unvaccinated.
What are the officials saying?
According to the Wall Street Journal, some CDC officials disagree with the agency’s public communication.
From the WSJ:
The significance of some viral load data has been disputed. Some officials within the CDC disagree with the agency’s conclusion that vaccinated people who are infected can spread the virus as easily as unvaccinated people, and argue that more testing needs to be done, including including tests that measure the degree of contamination of viral particles, according to a person familiar with the subject.
At the center of the problem is the study released by the CDC as evidence to justify its reversal of the mask direction.
“They make these decisions on the basis of extremely weak and unreliable data, and at the same time do not do the necessary work to reduce uncertainty within the population”, Vinay Prasad, doctor and professor in the department of epidemiology and of biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco, told the WSJ. “When there isn’t a lot of study data, the CDC should conduct these studies.”
The study – centered on a COVID-19 outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusetts, last month – found that nearly three-quarters of those who became breakthrough cases, meaning they contracted COVID-19 despite the being fully vaccinated. Because the CDC reportedly found that the viral load in infected vaccinated people was similar to the viral load in unvaccinated people, the CDC concluded that vaccinated people are likely as contagious as unvaccinated people.
But, as TheBlaze reported, this study was ripe with skewed variables. For example, 85% of those infected were men, a statistic that raises eyebrows. But that makes sense considering that an annual gathering of thousands of gay men was held in Provincetown just before the outbreak there.
As critics underlined, the Provincetown study may be further skewed by a small sample size, but not random.
Another study examining cases in one county in Wisconsin found similar results to the CDC study in Provincetown, concluding that vaccinated people are just as contagious as unvaccinated people. However, the sample size in this study was anemic at best: only 83 people.
Legitimate studies there?
A recent study by scientists in the UK may confirm the suspicions of dissident CDC officials.
This study, using a sample of around 50,000 vaccinated people, found that vaccinated people are not, in fact, as contagious as unvaccinated people and do not transmit the Delta variant as easily.
“[Cycle threshold] values among vaccinated people indicate lower infectivity, consistent with transmission studies conducted when the Alpha variant was dominant, in which vaccinated people were at a significantly lower risk of transmitting infection, ”the document explained.
As statistician Nate Silver underline, the UK study also used a random sample of people, not just self-identified people. This is an important distinction because people who self-report likely have symptoms (which triggered their self-report) and, therefore, a higher viral load than asymptomatic vaccinees.
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