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Public Health On Call

1015 - Unexplained Pauses in CDC Data

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Medicine, Health & Fitness, News

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2026

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

About this episode:

The CDC has long collected and publicly reported data on infectious diseases, vaccination rates, overdose deaths, and other health topics. But in 2025, many of these datasets inexplicably went dark. In this episode: the importance of real-time data in implementing public health solutions and the potential consequences of these lapses in reporting.

Guests:

Janet Freilich, JD, is a professor at the Boston University School of Law. She writes and teaches in the areas of patent law, intellectual property, information law, and civil procedure.

Host:

Stephanie Desmon, MA, is a former journalist, author, and the director of public relations and communications for the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs.

Show links and related content:

Transcript information:

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

0:05.9

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

0:16.3

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

0:23.8

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

0:31.4

Hey listeners, it's Ziz Smith-Rogers.

0:34.2

Public health decisions rely on up-to-date CDC data, but in 2025, some key federal

0:39.8

health databases suddenly stopped updating without explanation. Today, Boston University's

0:45.7

Janet Freilich joined Stephanie Desmond to discuss her team's new research, explaining what

0:50.8

information is missing and why trust in government data is really vital to the nation's health.

0:55.8

Let's listen.

0:56.9

Janet Frailich, thanks so much for joining me.

0:59.3

Thank you for having me.

1:00.9

Today I want to talk about public health decisions.

1:03.5

I know that the CDC collects a lot of real-time data about what's going on health-wise in the country.

1:09.9

They use this information to make vaccine recommendations, to work on outbreak response.

1:16.8

Your work has shown that in 2025, some of that data started disappearing or not appearing.

1:23.4

And I'm wondering if you can talk us through what happened.

1:26.3

Maybe start with what kinds of health data

1:28.2

to CDC normally track, and why does it matter? The CDC tracks a wide range of data on a wide range

1:36.3

of topics. We were focused on data sets that were intended to be frequently updated. So this is

1:43.1

information that might change quickly

1:46.1

over time, things like infectious disease burdens, pathogen tracking, vaccination rates,

...

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