https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/10/01/cdc-as-bad-as-harvard-no-but-they-could-still-do-better/
CDC as bad as Harvard? . . . no, but they could still do better
Commenter Kevin writes:
Consider this article on the CDC website:
“New CDC Study: Vaccination Offers Higher Protection than Previous COVID-19 Infection”
From that headline, you would think that those who have been vaccinated (but have never had Covid) have better immunity than those who have recovered from Covid (but have never been vaccinated). After all, it says right there that vaccination offers higher protection. And in fact this is how the media, government officials, corporate policy makers, university administrations, etc. have interpreted it. It’s the reason why vaccination mandates don’t have an exclusion for those who have previously recovered from Covid.
Yet if one reads the body of the article carefully, the study in question does not support the headline. BOTH groups of subjects in the study were people who had previously been infected and recovered from Covid. The study merely indicates that vaccination can provide ADDITIONAL short-term protection above and beyond the immunity acquired by recovering from Covid. It does NOT compare those who have been vaccinated (only) to those who have recovered from Covid (only).
Given that there are various studies showing that previous infection (alone) provides as good or better protection than vaccination (alone), and better in the case of the Delta variant, this article seems to be a deliberate attempt to mislead the public.
I have no idea if this is a deliberate attempt to mislead—people make lots of errors by accident—but . . . the press release is dated August 6! I’d think that someone during the past two months would’ve notified the problem and informed the CDC press office.
It says, “Page last reviewed: August 6, 2021,” and maybe they have a policy of not correcting old press releases, and I can kind of understand why such a policy would generally make sense, but in this case I hope they can fix the headline.
On the plus side, the body of the press release seems just fine, and the study in question (with the accurate title, “Reduced Risk of Reinfection . . .”) appears to support the CDC’s recommendation, “If you have had COVID-19 before, please still get vaccinated.” So I don’t know that the misleading headline has policy implications, but, yeah, don’t write misleading headlines. And correct them when you learn about the error.
P.S. OK, I guess the CDC isn’t quite so bad as Harvard‘s Jesus story, where the untruths were not just in the headline but in the entire webpage, which was rotten to the core. So, in the spirit of the above, I added “? . . . no, but they could still do better” to the above headline. Had I not made that addition, I’d be as bad as the CDC!
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