The New York Times reported that, for more than a year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has collected data on hospitalizations for COVID-19 across the country and broken it down by age, race and vaccination status, without making large portions of the information public.

The newspaper quoted Sunday several people familiar with the data saying that "two full years into the pandemic, the agency leading the country's response to the public health emergency has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected."

The performance of vaccines and boosters, particularly in younger adults, is among the most glaring omissions in data the CDC has made public, the NYT further reported. 

Two weeks ago, when the CDC published the first significant data on the effectiveness of boosters in adults younger than 65, it left out the numbers for a huge portion of that population, 18- to 49-year-olds, because that group is the least likely to benefit from extra shots as the first two doses have already left them well-protected, said the NYT.

Moreover, some U.S. states and localities had been sharing wastewater information with the agency since the start of the pandemic, but the CDC had never released those findings. Not until recently, the agency debuted a dashboard of wastewater data on its website that will be updated daily and might provide early signals of an upcoming surge of COVID-19 cases.

It has also been difficult to find CDC 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' Committee on Infectious Diseases. The academy's staff asked their CDC partners for that information on a call in December and were told it was unavailable.

"Much of the withheld information could help state and local health officials better target their efforts to bring the virus under control," said the report, claiming that detailed, timely data on hospitalizations by age and race would help health officials identify and help the populations at highest risk.

In addition, information on hospitalizations and deaths by age and vaccination status would have helped inform whether healthy adults needed booster shots, and wastewater surveillance across the nation would spot outbreaks and emerging variants early, the report further reported.

Dr Daniel Jernigan, the agency's deputy director for public health science and surveillance, said the pandemic exposed the fact that data systems at the CDC and at the state levels are outmoded and not up to handling large volumes of data.

"We want better, faster data that can lead to decision making and actions at all levels of public health, that can help us eliminate the lag in data that has held us back," he added.

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

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

The CDC 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 and these steps can add delays.

Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation's Pandemic Prevention Institute, said that "the CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization." 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 CDC, he said.