> The nation is flying blind yet again, critics say, because on May 1 of this year — as the new variant found a foothold in the U.S. — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mostly stopped tracking COVID-19 in vaccinated people, also known as breakthrough cases, unless the illness was severe enough to cause hospitalization or death. > > Individual states now set their own criteria for collecting data on breakthrough cases, resulting in a muddled grasp of COVID-19’s impact, leaving experts in the dark as to the true number of infections among the vaccinated, whether or not vaccinated people can develop long-haul illness, and the risks to unvaccinated children as they return to school. Fucking hubris at its finest. "Durr, this vaccine, no way anyone can get COVID with it. So we'll just stop tracking people getting sick, because there can't be many. Oh look, we have virtually zero mild COVID cases for vaccinated people, vaccine is working great!" > The CDC told ProPublica in an email that it continues to study breakthrough cases, just in a different way. “This shift will help maximize the quality of the data collected on cases of greatest clinical and public health importance,” the email said. How about you fucking collect data in exactly the same way as you do for unvaccinated people, and let the data fall where it may? By collecting it differently, they can always excuse anything bad about the vaccine by saying it's a difference due to the different ways of collecting data, rather than due to the vaccine not working.