‘People should be talking about it’: moves to curtail vaccine information obscures important science, doctors say

A series of high-profile and under-the-radar decisions by US health agencies have scientists and doctors questioning the extent of the agencies’ control over public communications – and they say the debate is obscuring the most important part, which is informing the public about key updates in science and medicine . Studies on the safety of vaccines against shingles and Covid were reportedly quashed before publication by officials at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The news follows the hasty halt on publication of a study on the effectiveness of Covid boosters by the top acting official at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and research terminated or never approved in the first place because of keywords such as “hesitancy” and “misinformation” at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The decisions threaten the reputations of US health agencies and the public’s trust in science and policy – and the surrounding tumult threatens to obscure important information to the public and the scientific community, experts say. “The science and the basis of why we were even doing these studies has been sort of lost in the mist,” said Michelle Barron, professor of infectious diseases at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a co-author on the study on Covid vaccines unexpectedly halted by Jay Bhattacharya, who is currently leading the CDC in the absence of a Senate-confirmed director. …