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Dr Roger Watson
Professor Roger Watson is Distinguished Professor of Nursing at Southwest Medical University, China. He has a PhD in biochemistry. He writes in a personal capacity.
Global Health NOW, the website of the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, in its recent newsletters expressed concern, initially at the delay and then the refusal of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States to publish a Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which, according to the Washington Post, showed “Covid vaccine benefits”.
The blame for this sin of omission was laid at the feet of the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr. (RFK). However, while RFK has ultimate responsibility for the decision about the report, the person taking the decision was Dr Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and acting director of the CDC. Both the NIH and the CDC come under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Dr Bhattacharya, appointed by RFK, arrived at his job at the NIH with a black mark against him for having been a signatory to, and one of the instigators of, the Great Barrington Declaration, which was critical of the worldwide lockdown policy in the wake of Covid-19 in 2020. He has subsequently expressed concern about the Covid-19 vaccines. He is not popular with the Covid orthodox community, the one which continues to view lockdowns, face masks and the Covid-19 vaccines as having been both necessary and effective.
In a recent ‘fireside chat’ with US economist Emily Oster, published in UK Oxford psychologist Dorothy Bishop’s blog and linked in the Retraction Watch newsletter of April 27th 2026, Dr Bhattacharya is questioned about many things, including the decision not to publish the report referred to by the Washington Post.
Bishop prefaces her transcript of the chat with her own spin and presents the session as something of a slam dunk for Oster. But that is not conveyed in reading the transcript. Oster and Bhattacharya are respectful and polite, and Bhattacharya gave full and frank answers to her questions.
Bishop refers to how “Bhattacharya’s cosy demeanour fractured” when asked about policy changes at the NIH. He warned her against listening to “fake news” about the issue. But “Oster didn’t give up”, according to Bishop, while Bhattacharya seemed simply at pains to point out that there was no political agenda behind the decisions taken on research funding; rather, that there was a crisis in the replication of research which was being addressed.
Turning to the Covid-19 vaccine report, according to Bishop, Bhattacharya is evasive but the intrepid Oster “pushes him on this”. In fact, reading the transcript clearly shows that Bhattacharya gave an immediate answer regarding the design used on the report – a test-negative design – and Oster agreed saying, “I think this method is ridiculous” and repeats her criticism later, saying, “It is ridiculous, it’s not a great method.”
Oster does ask Bhattacharya why the CDC published an earlier report on the influenza vaccines using the same method, to which he replies, “That was cleared before I got in right, I didn’t see the thing cross my desk.” Clearly, either Bishop was listening to different chat from the one which she transcribed, or she had already decided what point she wanted to make, regardless of the actual content.
The report is ‘leaked’
Two days after Retraction Watch provided the link to Bishop’s blog, on April 29th 2026 it provided another link to the Inside Medicine Substack purporting to provide the full text of the blocked Covid-19 report. The post, written by Dr Jeremy Faust and titled, ‘Exclusive: Here’s the Covid-19 vaccine paper the CDC censored’ with the strapline, “RFK Jr and the CDC’s top official, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, don’t want you to read this. That’s exactly why you should” extols the virtues of the report.
Provided to Inside Medicine by “someone close to the study”, the report titled ‘Interim effectiveness of 2025–2026 Covid-19 vaccines’ contains data that “suggest” the recent vaccines were “53–55 per cent effective against hospitalisations”. Described as “solid science”, Dr Faust claims that one of Jay Bhattacharya’s objections to the report was that it was not peer reviewed.
Normally, the lack of peer review would be a fair criticism but Dr Faust claims that obviating the peer review allows for a study “to be rapid when necessary” and – unbelievably – says that “nowhere was this advantage clearer than in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic”. Perhaps the most telling comment by Faust is that such reports are considered the “voice of CDC” and thus need “to be consistent with CDC recommendations”. In other words, they cannot take the risk of independent experts indicating that there may be flaws in such reports related to design, methods and interpretation.
Test-negative design
At the heart of Jay Bhattacharya’s objection to the report is the test-negative design of the Covid-19 vaccine study. Faust reckons, as if this alone were justification, that test-negative “studies are a part of the overall landscape for evaluating vaccines” and that “the science in this paper is pretty standard”. Quoting another source he says, “We want data so that we know when something’s working, and when something is not working.” All reasonable arguments provided the standard science is rigorous and that the results obtained are accurate.
Bhattacharya’s objections to the test-negative design are well justified. Test-negative is a design that looks rigorous, but which has serious limitations. It does not compare populations at risk, it compares already symptomatic, healthcare-seeking individuals who happen to be tested. Estimates of effectiveness are not obtained from any direct measure of risk.
In the withheld study, among those hospitalised, six per cent of cases (who tested positive for Covid-19) were vaccinated compared with 12 per cent of controls (who tested negative for Covid-19 despite having symptoms). From this modest difference, the authors infer a halving of risk. But this is a relative comparison within a selected group, not an absolute reduction in the real-world likelihood of hospitalisation. The study population is already shaped by prior infection, prior vaccination and other variables, especially health-seeking behaviour.
The test-negative design presumes comparable healthcare-seeking behaviour, yet vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals demonstrably differ in when and why they test. Behaviour, exposure and the ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect are conceded by the authors of the report but none of these effects is accounted for. The outcome of “Covid hospitalisation” is ambiguous; it may reflect admission with an incidental positive test rather than disease severe enough to warrant admission.
All the study shows is that, among people who felt ill enough to be tested and entered the healthcare system, the odds of having been vaccinated differed between those testing positive and negative for Covid-19. This may provide a useful starting point for further investigation, but it tells us little about the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccines. It would be useful to know how many of the other studies that were used to prop up the continued rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines used the test-negative design.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
