Why does the CDC hoard the data that supports its guidance?

Last update: Thursday 2/23/22 

Regular readers of this blog know that its editor does not believe that our mismanagement of the pandemic was caused by "bad guys". The primary source of our failure continues to be the incorrect and/or untimely guidance provided by the CDC. There are no "bad guys" at the CDC, just a bunch of well-intended, poorly organized experts in the bio sciences who have little or no training or prior experience managing human behavior in an unavoidably political context. To be sure, President Trump was an irresponsible "bad guy" who should have perceived the CDC's collective incompetence during the initial months of the pandemic; he should have reorganized it immediately from top to bottom. President Biden is not irresponsible, but he is becoming a "bad guy" by refusing to conduct the top-to-bottom reorganization that is more needed now than when his predecessor sat in the Oval Office. This blog note was triggered by a recent article in the NY Times that discussed one of the CDC's most pernicious habits: data hoarding.

The headline succinctly describes this malpractice:

•  "The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects", Apoorva Mandavilli, NY Times, 2/20/22  

Written by one of the Times' best COVID reporters, the article begins with a summary, 

"The agency has withheld critical data on boosters, hospitalizations and, until recently, wastewater analyses."

The article goes on to cite specific examples of the CDC's data hoarding:

• "For more than a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has collected data on hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the United States and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status. But it has not made most of the information public."
  
  
• "When the C.D.C. published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65 two weeks ago, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population: 18- to 49-year-olds, the group least likely to benefit from extra shots, because the first two doses already left them well-protected." ... Link to CDC report -- 1/22/22
   
• "The agency recently debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an oncoming surge of Covid cases. Some states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but it had never before released those findings." ... Link to CDC wastewater dashboard

Why do organizations hoard data???  

The most obvious answer to this question is power, as in, "Knowledge is power". Power based on secret knowledge can be a good thing in the private sector, as in the market advantages bestowed on corporations that hold active patents on the technologies at the core of their most popular products. Pursuit of these advantages motivates investments in R&D. In the private sector, knowledge is inversely related to the number of people who have access to this knowledge; its value is greatest when it is known to the smallest number of people.

By contrast, in the public sector, especially in the subsector of the public sector that is responsible for public health, the value of knowledge is positively related to the number of people who become aware of the knowledge. The more people who know what's really so, the better off we all become. There should be no secrets in public health, especially in a federal republic like ours. If states share data with the CDC, the CDC should share data with the states ... and with the residents of the states who give access to data about their individual health conditions to the states and to the CDC

The U.S. Census Bureau as a model of data transparency for the CDC

The big picture of the CDC from 10,000 feet shows that the CDC is (1) the leading source of quality data about the nation's infectious diseases, and (2) a provider of guidance about the prevention and management of infectious diseases, guidance that is based on the contents of its extensive data repository. 

Home Page of the CDC 

The following screen shot is a copy of the CDC's  home page ==> www.cdc.gov 

Neoskeptic editor's critique of the home page of the CDC

The CDC's home page shows that the CDC has two ways to hoard its data: 

• First, it doesn't publish the data, or
• Second, it provides links to the published data on its lengthy, cluttered home page wherein no one can find the links except Sherlock Holmes, long-term CDC employees, and policy paparazzi from the NY Times ... :-(

Home Page of the U.S. Census Bureau

As stated on its new home page, the Census Bureau strives to maintain its status as "the leading source of quality data about the nation's people and economy." The Census Bureau collects the data and publishes the following reports:

• Decennial Census (everybody, population & housing, every 10 years)
• Economic Census (every five years in years ending in "2" and "7")
• Census of Governments (every five years in years ending in "2" and "7")
• American Community Survey (3.5 million sample, every year)
• 129 other sample surveys
• Geospatial system for boundary and thematic maps of data in areas including the entire nation, regions, states. school districts, counties, census tracts, zip codes, congressional districts, voting districts, urban areas, etc, etc, etc, 

The Census Bureau manages a bazillion bytes of data ... seriously, at least a thousand times as much as the CDC, considering its broader scope and longer time series. All of the tables and maps in its published reports can be accessed online starting from its home page. The system is designed for ease of use by everyone with a minimal amount of training, from school children wanting to find out how many people live in their county to complex queries posed by data scientists that require the generation of new tables and maps that were not included in any of the Bureau's published reports. 

In short, the Bureau's online system enables users to extract data bytes from its vast repository and arrange them into meaningful patterns, i.e., comprehensible tables and eye-catching maps. The info in this brief overview came from the PDF of the screens in the Bureau's introductory YouTube webinar: Census 101

Here's a copy of the new home page of the Census Bureau, located at data.census.gov 

Neoskeptic editor's critique of the new home page of the U.S. Census Bureau

HOW GOOGLE !!!! ... :-)

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Links to related notes on this blog:  

• "The CDC needs to be reorganized from top to bottom ... Part 1 (Trump's Disdain)", Last updated: 1/22/22
  
  
• "The CDC needs to be reorganized from top to bottom ... Part 2 (Biden's Turnaround Artist)", Last update: 1/11/22