Last week, the team behind Bloomberg’s COVID-19 vaccine tracker announced that the dashboard will stop updating on October 5.
Drew Armstrong, senior health care editor and leader of the tracking effort, provided the motivations for this decision in an update post. New rounds of booster shots around the world, including bivalent shots in some countries, have made it harder to track and present data: “There are more categories of data to collect and fewer simple comparisons among the more than 100 countries we’ve been tracking,” Armstrong wrote.
Armstrong also explained that the vaccine tracker has been a huge lift for Bloomberg, and the company is only able to put so many resources into a dashboard that really should be provided by government or academic institutions. (The COVID Tracking Project’s leaders said something similar when that project stopped data collection in spring 2021.)
While I’m sad to see this tracker go, I understand the decision and remain very grateful for all the work that’s gone into it since vaccination campaigns started in winter 2020. Congratulations to all of the Bloomberg journalists who contributed to this valuable resource!