Mainstream media pounce on NIH director for raising evidence standards for CDC research

Under the Biden administration, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal asserted that consistently wearing masks indoors sharply reduced the odds of COVID-19 infection – by more than 80%, as claimed by then-Director Rochelle Walensky.

The response rate for the phone survey, which asked 1,800 Californians in 2021 about their masking habits and infection history, was 13% percent for self-reported COVID positives and 9% for negatives. Participants with a known COVID contact were removed.

Positives got tested overwhelmingly due to symptoms, and negatives due to routine screening or requirements before medical procedures. That "wild confounding" between the groups made the survey's "test-negative" design inherently unreliable, according to a critic at the time.

Dubious COVID research that affirmed Biden administration narratives made Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which is not peer-reviewed, a recurring target of derision for public health experts, some of whom joined the Trump administration.

Now that one of them is temporarily directing the CDC, National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya, mainstream media are crying foul about alleged suppression of research that undermines Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s agenda.

The Washington Post and New York Times omitted MMWR's checkered history in reporting that Bhattacharya axed a study that, according to a summary they viewed, found new COVID vaccines reduced the chance of emergency department and urgent care visits by 50%, and COVID-associated hospitalizations by 55%, for healthy adults last winter.

They said it had been scheduled for publishing in MMWR on March 19. The Post first reported April 9 that Bhattacharya had delayed its publication.

It's not the first MMWR controversy of the Trump administration. 

A former deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, UCLA researcher Edward Livingston, claimed the CDC "misled the public" with a study in the journal's Dec. 11 edition that implied COVID vaccines saved healthy children from serious outcomes last season.

'Test-negative' design to measure vaccine efficacy is inherently unreliable

Criticizing the weakness of COVID research published in MMWR helped get multiple public health experts on the Trump administration's radar and into positions at the Food and Drug Administration. 

Commissioner Marty Makary called the journal a "joke" in 2023 congressional testimony, highlighting its dismissal of natural immunity as comparable to vaccination, while his departing vaccines chief Vinay Prasad mocked the mask study based on a low-response phone survey as a "new scientific low point" for MMWR in 2022.

Prasad and acting Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Tracy Beth Hoeg coauthored a peer-reviewed study in 2023 accusing the CDC of repeatedly misrepresenting mask research, with three-quarters of MMWR studies concluding masks were effective despite only 14% reaching statistical significance and 30% actually studying mask effectiveness.

Harvard public health professor Joseph Allen joined Prasad in criticizing a 2022 MMWR study for weak methodology. The study claimed children and teens who recovered from COVID infections are "up to" 2.5 times likelier to develop diabetes, and promoted vaccination as the solution.

The journal has occasionally bucked its reputation for protecting the COVID catechism, finding natural immunity was more effective than the COVID vaccine during the delta wave.

Bhattacharya confirmed Wednesday he objected to the axed study's "statistically flawed" test-negative design, the same used in the mask survey, in rebutting a critic's speculation that the CDC was "hiding" the study because it showed "the vaccine is safe and effective."

"The authors can do whatever they want with the paper, but they do not have a right to publish in MMWR just because they like their own method," Bhattacharya told Pradheep Shanker, a radiologist and contributor to National Review.

The conservative magazine's editors praised mRNA COVID vaccines based on Biden administration claims about their effectiveness against hospitalization and death, shortly after a German-led study found "numerous off-target products" produced by them have a tendency to get stuck in heart cells.

"Given its statistical flaws, no one should view the paper as providing an accurate measure of vaccine efficacy," Bhattacharya wrote. "If a study uses a test negative design to measure vaccine efficacy, it will be a heavy lift to convince me that there is anything to learn from it, no matter what the results are," he responded to Shanker's prodding about bias.

"Scientific reports are routinely reviewed at multiple levels to ensure they meet the highest standards before publication," HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon wrote in an email. "The MMWR's editorial assessment identified concerns regarding the methodological approach to estimating vaccine effectiveness and the manuscript was not accepted for publication."

Ignored 'prior infection, behavior, and care-seeking patterns'

Bhattacharya emphasized MMWR is "a non-peer-reviewed journal that serves as the voice of CDC policy," which was lost or misleadingly portrayed in mainstream media.

The Post implied MMWR was peer-reviewed when it said test-negative design was used in a 2021 study on vaccine effectiveness in the New England Journal of Medicine and in "other peer-reviewed journals," without disclaiming MMWR is not peer-reviewed.

Georgetown University distinguished professor Lawrence Gostin, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, explicitly claimed on X that MMWR is peer-reviewed, also prompting a Bhattacharya correction. "But we are working on changing that," Bhattacharya said.

An HHS official told Just the News on Thursday that Bhattacharya had met with scientific staff since Wednesday's news reports about the study's axing, and that the manuscript authors declined to use a different methodology.

"The methodological concerns here are real and well understood, particularly for respiratory viruses like COVID, where prior infection, behavior, and care-seeking patterns can meaningfully affect results," the official said. The paper "underwent extensive internal discussion among CDC scientists and leadership, which is exactly how a scientific process is supposed to work."

"His request for a change in methodology is really too late after the fact," Deb Houry, who resigned as CDC chief medical officer when Kennedy dumped the first Senate-confirmed CDC director, Susan Monarez, less than a month into her service, told CNN.

"In general, their methodology was appropriate and has been used in other studies," said Houry, adding she "very rarely rejected a paper this late" when reviewing MMWR.

The Post noted the same methodology was used in a recent MMWR paper on this past winter's flu vaccine effectiveness. An HHS official told the Post that Bhattacharya would have raised the same concerns had, in the newspaper's paraphrase, he been "in a position to review" it.

Monarez and Houry testified before the Senate health panel after Kennedy ousted the former, with Monarez resisting straight answers to questions by Republican lawmakers including ones on the tradeoffs of COVID vaccines and even the identity of her lawyers in the room, whom Houry belatedly named. 

President Trump's new CDC director-nominee, Erica Schwartz, who would replace Bhattacharya if confirmed, is another conventional pick, with a history of enforcing vaccine mandates. 

"We just need someone who’s not crazy,” a White House official allegedly told CNN.