Prof. Dr. Ahmet Rasim Küçükusta

Dikkat: Yazının sonunda ek var!

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Tüm dünya tıbbının yakından takip ettiği; açıklama, ikaz ve tavsiyelerini adeta emir kabul ettiği USA’ nın Hastalık Kontrol ve Önleme Merkezi CDC’ nin ticaret ve siyaset tarafından yönetilen bir kurum olduğunu, açıklamalarının ihtiyatla değerlendirilmesi gerektiği kanaatindeyim.

CDC’ nin 13 sene evvelki domuz gribi salgınından bugüne gerçek bilimle uyuşmayan, ticaret ve siyasete hizmet eden birçok faaliyeti oldu.

CDC, bizi Kovid pandemisinde de yanıltmadı.

Bu ünlü kurum şimdi de Kovid-19 sebebiyle hastaneye yatışlar hakkında topladığı ve bunları yaşa, ırka ve aşı durumuna göre ayırdığı verileri kamuoyuna açıklamamakla suçlanıyor.

Bilimin, bilimsel verilerin nasıl maniple edildiğine, saklandığına, duruma göre abartıldığına veya küçümsendiğine bir kere daha şahit oluyoruz.

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New York Times’ ta “The C.D.C. Isn’t Publishing Large Portions of the Covid Data It Collects” başlıklı makale:

Ajans, güçlendiriciler (hatırlatma dozları), hastaneye yatışlar ve yakın zamana kadar atık su analizleri hakkında kritik verileri sakladı.

Bir yıldan fazla bir süredir Hastalık Kontrol ve Önleme Merkezi, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri’ndeki Kovid-19 sebebiyle hastaneye yatışlar hakkında veri topladı ve bunları yaşa, ırka ve aşı durumuna göre ayırdı ama bu bilgilerin çoğunu kamuoyuna açıklamadı.

C.D.C. İki hafta önce 65 yaşın altındaki yetişkinlerde güçlendiricilerin etkinliğine ilişkin ilk önemli verileri yayınlarken bu popülasyonun büyük bir kısmı için sayıları açıklamadı: Bunlar, ilk iki doz onları zaten iyi korunmuş halde bıraktığından, ekstra aşılardan en az fayda sağlayan grup yani 18-49 yaş arası olanlar idi.

Ajans kısa süre önce web sitesinde günlük olarak yenilenen ve yaklaşmakta olan bir Kovid vakası artışının erken sinyallerini sağlayabilecek bir atık su verisi panosu yayınladı. Bazı eyaletler ve bölgeler, pandeminin başlangıcından bu yana atık su bilgilerini ajansla paylaşıyordu, ancak daha önce bu bulguları yayınlamamıştı.

Verilere aşina olan birçok kişi, pandeminin üzerinden tam iki yıl geçmişken, ülkenin halk sağlığı acil durumuna müdahalesine öncülük eden ajansın topladığı verilerin yalnızca küçük bir kısmını yayınladığını söyledi.

Saklanan bilgilerin çoğu, eyalet ve yerel sağlık yetkililerinin virüsü kontrol altına alma çabalarını daha iyi hedeflemesine yardımcı olabilir.

Yaşa ve ırka göre hastaneye yatışlarla ilgili ayrıntılı ve zamanında veriler, sağlık görevlilerinin en yüksek risk altındaki nüfusu belirlemesine ve yardımcı olmasına yardımcı olacaktır. Yaşa ve aşı durumuna göre hastaneye yatışlar ve ölümler hakkında bilgi, sağlıklı yetişkinlerin destekleyici aşılara ihtiyaç duyup duymadığını belirlemeye yardımcı olabilirdi. Ve ülke çapında atık su gözetimi, salgınları ve ortaya çıkan varyantları erken tespit edebilir.

18 ila 49 yaşındakiler için güçlendirici dozlara ait veriler olmadan, federal sağlık kurumlarının tavsiye aradığı dış uzmanlar, aşılarla ilgili tavsiyelerde bulunmak için İsrail’den gelen rakamlara güvenmek zorunda kaldı. ((The New York Times’tan o yaş grubu için destek verileri hakkında taleplerden sonra, ajans perşembe gecesi web sitesinde yayınladı.)

CDC’nin sözcüsü Kristen Nordlund, ajansın farklı veri akışlarını yayınlamakta yavaş olduğunu, çünkü “temelde, günün sonunda, henüz prime time için hazır olmadığını” söyledi. Ajansın “herhangi bir veri toplarken önceliğinin, doğru ve eyleme geçirilebilir olmasını sağlamak olduğunu” söyledi.

Bayan Nordlund, bir başka sebebin de bilgilerin yanlış yorumlanabileceği korkusu olduğunu söyledi.

Ajansın halk sağlığı bilimi ve gözetiminden sorumlu müdür yardımcısı Dr. Daniel Jernigan, pandeminin C.D.C.’deki ve eyalet seviyelerindeki veri sistemlerinin modası geçmiş ve büyük hacimli verileri işlemeye uygun olmadığı gerçeğini ortaya çıkardığını, bilim adamlarının sistemleri modernize etmeye çalıştıklarını söyledi.

“Halk sağlığının her düzeyinde karar verme ve eylemlere yol açabilecek, bizi geride tutan verilerdeki gecikmeyi ortadan kaldırmamıza yardımcı olabilecek daha iyi, daha hızlı veriler istiyoruz” diye ekledi.

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The C.D.C. also has multiple bureaucratic divisions that must sign off on important publications, and its officials must alert the Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees the agency — and the White House of their plans. The agency often shares data with states and partners before making data public. Those steps can add delays.

“The C.D.C. is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. “The steps that it takes to get something like this released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the C.D.C.”

The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the C.D.C. has made public.

Last year, the agency repeatedly came under fire for not tracking so-called breakthrough infections in vaccinated Americans, and focusing only on individuals who became ill enough to be hospitalized or die. The agency presented that information as risk comparisons with unvaccinated adults, rather than provide timely snapshots of hospitalized patients stratified by age, sex, race and vaccination status.

But the C.D.C. has been routinely collecting information since the Covid vaccines were first rolled out last year, according to a federal official familiar with the effort. The agency has been reluctant to make those figures public, the official said, because they might be misinterpreted as the vaccines being ineffective.

Ms. Nordlund confirmed that as one of the reasons. Another reason, she said, is that the data represents only 10 percent of the population of the United States. But the C.D.C. has relied on the same level of sampling to track influenza for years.

Some outside public health experts were stunned to hear that information exists.

“We have been begging for that sort of granularity of data for two years,” said Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist and part of the team that ran Covid Tracking Project, an independent effort that compiled data on the pandemic till March 2021.

A detailed analysis, she said, “builds public trust, and it paints a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on.”

Concern about the misinterpretation of hospitalization data broken down by vaccination status is not unique to the C.D.C. On Thursday, public health officials in Scotland said they would stop releasing data on Covid hospitalizations and deaths by vaccination status because of similar fears that the figures would be misrepresented by anti-vaccine groups.

But the experts dismissed the potential misuse or misinterpretation of data as an acceptable reason for not releasing it.

“We are at a much greater risk of misinterpreting the data with data vacuums, than sharing the data with proper science, communication and caveats,” Ms. Rivera said.

When the Delta variant caused an outbreak in Massachusetts last summer, the fact that three-quarters of those infected were vaccinated led people to mistakenly conclude that the vaccines were powerless against the virus — validating the C.D.C.’s concerns.

But that could have been avoided if the agency had educated the public from the start that as more people are vaccinated, the percentage of vaccinated people who are infected or hospitalized would also rise, public health experts said.

 “Tell the truth, present the data,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration. “I have to believe that there is a way to explain these things so people can understand it.”

Knowing which groups of people were being hospitalized in the United States, which other conditions those patients may have had and how vaccines changed the picture over time would have been invaluable, Dr. Offit said.

Relying on Israeli data to make booster recommendations for Americans was less than ideal, Dr. Offit noted.

“There’s no reason that they should be better at collecting and putting forth data than we were,” Dr. Offit said of Israeli scientists. “The C.D.C. is the principal epidemiological agency in this country, and so you would like to think the data came from them.”

It has also been difficult to find C.D.C. data on the proportion of children hospitalized for Covid who have other medical conditions, said Dr. Yvonne Maldonado, chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s Committee on Infectious Diseases.

The academy’s staff asked their partners at the C.D.C. for that information on a call in December, according to a spokeswoman for the A.A.P., and were told it was unavailable.

Ms. Nordlund pointed to data on the agency’s website that includes this information, and to multiple published reports on pediatric hospitalizations with information on children who have other health conditions.

The pediatrics academy has repeatedly asked the C.D.C. for an estimate on the contagiousness of a person infected with the coronavirus five days after symptoms begin — but Dr. Maldonado finally got the answer from an article in The New York Times in December.

“They’ve known this for over a year and a half, right, and they haven’t told us,” she said. “I mean, you can’t find out anything from them.”

Experts in wastewater analysis were more understanding of the C.D.C.’s slow pace of making that data public. The C.D.C. has been building the wastewater system since September 2020, and the capacity to present the data over the past few months, Ms. Nordlund said. In the meantime, the C.D.C.’s state partners have had access to the data, she said.

Despite the cautious preparation, the C.D.C. released the wastewater data a week later than planned. The Covid Data Tracker is updated only on Thursdays, and the day before the original release date, the scientists who manage the tracker realized they needed more time to integrate the data.

“It wasn’t because the data wasn’t ready, it was because the systems and how it physically displayed on the page wasn’t working the way that they wanted it to,” Ms. Nordlund said.

The C.D.C. has received more than $1 billion to modernize its systems, which may help pick up the pace, Ms. Nordlund said. “We’re working on that,” she said.

The agency’s public dashboard now has data from 31 states. Eight of those states, including Utah, began sending their figures to the C.D.C. in the fall of 2020. Some relied on scientists volunteering their expertise; others paid private companies. But many others, such as Mississippi, New Mexico and North Dakota, have yet to begin tracking wastewater.

Utah’s fledgling program in April 2020 has now grown to cover 88 percent of the state’s population, with samples being collected twice a week, according to Nathan LaCross, who manages Utah’s wastewater surveillance program.

Wastewater data reflects the presence of the virus in an entire community, so it is not plagued by the privacy concerns attached to medical information that would normally complicate data release, experts said.

“There are a bunch of very important and substantive legal and ethical challenges that don’t exist for wastewater data,” Dr. Scarpino said. “That lowered bar should certainly mean that data could flow faster.”

Tracking wastewater can help identify areas experiencing a high burden of cases early, Dr. LaCross said. That allows officials to better allocate resources like mobile testing teams and testing sites.

Wastewater is also a much faster and more reliable barometer of the spread of the virus than the number of cases or positive tests. Well before the nation became aware of the Delta variant, for example, scientists who track wastewater had seen its rise and alerted the C.D.C., Dr. Scarpino said. They did so in early May, just before the agency famously said vaccinated people could take off their masks.

Even now, the agency is relying on a technique that captures the amount of virus, but not the different variants in the mix, said Mariana Matus, chief executive officer of BioBot Analytics, which specializes in wastewater analysis. That will make it difficult for the agency to spot and respond to outbreaks of new variants in a timely manner, she said.

“It gets really exhausting when you see the private sector working faster than the premier public health agency of the world,” Ms. Rivera said.

Kaynak: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html

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EK 1 (9.3.2022): SİMONE GOLD “Özel çıkarlara veya Big Pharma’ya karşı çıkarsanız, itibarınızı lekelemek ve altyapınıza saldırmak için kaynak ayırırlar. Anlatılanlara gerçeklerle karşılık verirseniz, sosyal medyadan yasaklanır ve susturulursunuz. Orwell’yen zamanlarda yaşıyoruz.”

%100 doğru!

Kaynak: https://twitter.com/drsimonegold/status/1444732725307613184?s=20&t=iuU2GtMCavPly9dBPqDw5A

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EK 2 (9.3.2022): SİMONE GOLD “The Blaze’ in FOIA (Bilgiye Erişim Özgürlüğü Yasası) talebine göre, federal hükümet aşıların reklâmını yapmaları için ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN ve MSNBC gibi medya kuruluşlarına ödeme yaptı. Bu sadece bir çıkar çatışmasından daha fazlasıdır. Bu etik değil.” Kaynak: https://twitter.com/drsimonegold/status/1501340349037367298?s=20&t=iuU2GtMCavPly9dBPqDw5A

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EK 3 (10.3.2022): Conflict of Interest? Bill Gates Gave $319 Million to Major Media Outlets, Documents Reveal

According to MintPress News, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated at least $319 million to fund media projects at hundreds of organizations including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic, raising questions about those news outlets’ ability to report objectively on Gates and his work.

Up until his recent messy divorce, Bill Gates enjoyed something of a free pass in corporate media. Generally presented as a kindly nerd who wants to save the world, the Microsoft co-founder was even unironically christened “Saint Bill” by The Guardian.

While other billionaires’ media empires are relatively well known, the extent to which Gates’s cash underwrites the modern media landscape is not. After sorting through over 30,000 individual grants, MintPress can reveal that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) has made over $300 million worth of donations to fund media projects.

Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS and The Atlantic.

Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the UK; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.

The Gates Foundation money going towards media programs has been split up into a number of sections, presented in descending numerical order, and includes a link to the relevant grant on the organization’s website.

Kaynak: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/bill-melinda-gates-foundation-media-objectively/

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EK 4 (19.3.2022): CDC, veri düzeltmesinden sonra daha az COVID-19 pediatrik ölümü bildirdi. Buna göre, CDC’nin çocuklardaki ölüm tahmini 18 Mart itibariyle %24 azalarak 1.341’e düştü. Kaynak: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/cdc-reports-fewer-covid-19-pediatric-deaths-after-data-correction-2022-03-18/

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