News Release

“Not in the public interest”: HHS Ends Covid Hospitalization Dashboard

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Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services ended its dashboard that had tracked Covid-19 hospitalizations, announcing it was streamlining data sharing with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

ARI PAUL; ari.paul@gmail.com, @aripaul 
    Paul is a journalist for FAIR, the national media watch group.

Paul told the Institute for Public Accuracy today: “Any move by a government agency to either stop providing public health data or make that data harder to find is not in the public interest. When then-President Trump said ‘if we didn’t do testing, instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing we would have half the cases,’ he was rightly ridiculed in the press. The choice not to show certain data––or not to look at that data––doesn’t make the problem go away.”

Ending data collection or distribution about Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths may also exacerbate what Paul calls the “broader trend in media, government and business to declare that Covid is no longer a big deal — all in order to normalize things like getting workers back to the office physically five days a week and to end government interventions in public health like free testing and free vaccines. Having quick access to Covid data is a reminder that the world is still in a crisis that can only be solved by collective action and a more socialistic response to public health.” 

Along with many epidemiologists and public health advocates, Paul had previously been critical of a highly controversial opinion piece by Leana Wen in the Washington Post, which argued the U.S. is overcounting Covid-19 deaths and hospitalizations.