New Delhi, June 26 -- ATLANTA - The epidemiologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who spent months studying 85,000 patients' vaccination records were still employed by the CDC last Monday when JAMA Network Open published their findings. They had not left the agency. They had not been fired or reassigned. The journal published the work because the institution their study was designed for, the CDC's own publication arm, would not.

That is the precise moment the U.S. public health system has reached. A landmark peer-reviewed medical journal is now serving as a release valve for a government agency that has lost the ability, or the willingness, to release its own routine surveillance data. And the researchers whose work r...