Health officials stopped the publication of a study that examined whether COVID-19 vaccines were protecting adults from becoming sick enough to seek hospital care, according to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services spokesman who confirmed the decision.
The study was slated for release in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, but publication was halted after an internal dispute over the paper’s methodology, the spokesman said on Wednesday.
The study’s approach focused on sick people — including adults admitted to hospitals or who visited emergency rooms — and compared COVID-19 test results between vaccinated and unvaccinated patients. The methodology is one way researchers have estimated vaccine effectiveness, and papers using similar methods have been published in peer-reviewed journals after review by experts in the field, the Associated Press reported.
The study, which The Washington Post first reported had been canceled, concluded that the vaccine cut emergency room visits and hospitalizations among otherwise healthy adults by about half this past winter.
HHS officials did not describe in detail what they said was wrong with the methodology. They argued that factors such as prior infection, behavior, and differences in who seeks care can affect results.
Dr. Fiona Havers, an Atlanta-based doctor who previously worked at the CDC, said the concerns raised by HHS were not shared by the wider scientific community and that many researchers use the same approach. She said the methodology is designed to account for differences related to who seeks care, and that prior infection should not be a major issue because so many Americans have already been infected.
Havers also said there is no perfect study design, but that HHS officials had not proposed an alternative method that was “realistic and ethical for getting real-time estimates of how well vaccines are working each year,” adding that she once led a CDC hospital network surveillance team focused on COVID-19 and other respiratory viruses.
Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement that health care professionals rely on MMWR for timely, objective and fact-based information. He criticized what he described as “muzzling scientists and doctors” and said the CDC must abandon plans to place a political gag order on the research, warning of potential consequences for efforts to prevent hospitalizations.
The dispute comes amid renewed scrutiny of CDC publication practices. During President Donald Trump’s first administration, public health advocates worried political appointees were seeking to control what the CDC published in MMWR; similar concerns resurfaced after publication of the journal was temporarily suspended when Trump returned to office, with the publication later resuming in a thinner form.