COVID-19 Data Dispatch

Tag: vaccination data

  • Vaccination is a logistics problem

    Earlier this week, I got a frantic email from my grandma. She wanted my help in finding a vaccination appointment. She’d talked to her primary care provider and looked at her state public health agency’s website, but wasn’t sure how to actually secure her own spot in line. She lives in California, which is still officially in Phase 1A (vaccinating healthcare workers and long-term care facility residents), but is allowing some providers to start vaccinating seniors and essential workers based on “available supply.”

    My uncle did help my grandma get an appointment—one month from now and an hour’s drive away. Despite living in Berkeley, near several research universities, she’ll be heading to Palo Alto for her shots. I told her to keep a close eye on her county public health department’s website in case something becomes available there (which would be my advice to anyone else in this position), but I couldn’t guarantee that she’d be able to find an appointment any closer than the one she has now.

    And she’s not alone: a lot of grandmas are having trouble getting vaccination appointments. In fact, recent survey data from the Kaiser Family Foundation suggests that the majority of American seniors “do not have enough information about when and where they will be able to get the vaccine.” Black, Hispanic, and low income adults also report not having enough information about vaccinations, according to KFF. The minority communities that continue to be heavily impacted by the pandemic are supposed to be first in line for vaccines, but barriers to information and technology—particularly to vaccine registration portals—are leaving them behind once again.

    It would be easy to say the problem here is a lack of vaccine doses. But that’s not exactly it. The federal government is distributing millions of doses each week, and many of those doses are making it into arms: according to Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker, an average of 1.1 million shots were reported each day this past week. By sheer numbers, we are already on track to meet President Biden’s 100 million vaccinations in 100 days goal.

    Our current problem is, in fact, a logistics one. It’s a build up of infrastructure failures, with all the weight falling on those underfunded local public health departments I mentioned in the previous section. Right now, these public health workers are trying to set up vaccination appointments, while also dealing with constantly-changing information from their state on how many doses they will get, while also stretching out a depleted budget, while also probably short on personnel because half of their staff quit or got COVID-19 in 2020, while also dealing with backlash from their communities, while also fielding endless calls from confused grandmas… and all of this while still testing, contact tracing, and communicating basic pandemic safety measures. Whew. I got tired just writing that sentence.

    Some dimensions of this problem, such as the funding and lack of community trust, are years in the making. But there’s one piece the federal government may be able to solve soon, and it’s a data issue. The federal government is not giving states—and by extension, local public health agencies—enough lead time to coordinate their vaccine distribution. ProPublica reporters Caroline Chen, Isaac Arnsdorf and Ryan Gabrielson explained the situation in a detailed feature this week: unpredictable shipments at the national level mean that vaccine providers are unable to use up all of their shots in some weeks and cancelling appointments in others. The whole piece is worth reading, but I want to highlight the one quotation near the end:

    Starting Wednesday, it will be up to the Biden administration to provide clear visibility for states, according to a member of the president-elect’s COVID-19 team, who asked not to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of the new administration.

    “The government can point at the manufacturer, but it’s like asking the [Defense Department], ‘How many planes do you have?’ and them saying, ‘I don’t know, ask Boeing,’” the person said.

    Reporters at POLITICO similarly found that public health workers simply don’t trust the dose allocation system. While the Biden administration may want to ramp up vaccine production in order to vaccinate more Americans, this goal may be more easily achieved by ensuring vaccines are properly tracked. At every part of the vaccination pipeline, stakeholders should know how many doses they’re getting and when. Shipments should be predictable, and appointments should be easily managed, freeing up public health workers’ time to take on the important task of actually vaccinating people.

    And there are still holes in our data on who’s getting vaccinated, too. Only 23 states are reporting vaccinations by race and ethnicity; this is an improvement from last week, but still a far cry from comprehensive data collection. Another ProPublica investigation, meanwhile, found that many states aren’t requiring providers to report vaccine doses that go wasted, making it difficult to see a comprehensive picture of the shots that get spoiled or thrown in the trash.

    It also bears mentioning that Pfizer will now be shipping out fewer vaccine vials to account for the “surprise 6th dose” that providers are often able to get out of each vial—since Pfizer charges by the dose. It is unclear whether this reduction in dose availability will affect the rollout.

    One piece of good news, on the vaccination data front: the CDC vaccination tracker stepped up its reporting to include weekend updates, as of yesterday. But the agency still isn’t reporting demographic data, comprehensive data on long-term care facilities, or even a time series of doses administered per day. Vaccination tracking has a long way to go.

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    • How is the CDC tracking the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines?
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  • Vaccine confusion abounds—and this is the easy stage

    Vaccine confusion abounds—and this is the easy stage

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    It’s been one month since the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was authorized for use in the U.S. Since then, about 22 million Pfizer and Moderna doses have been distributed—and at least 6.7 million of those have actually made it into people’s arms, according to the CDC. (The CDC is not yet tracking second doses.)

    Despite the federal government’s intense push to get vaccines through safety trials, that “last mile” step—from the Pfizer and Moderna factories to people’s arms—has been under-planned and underfunded. In the past month, we’ve been shocked by news stories ranging from a Wisconsin medical employee “intentionally removing” doses from a refrigerator to a local journalist in Florida individually helping over 150 seniors register for vaccination appointments. 

    State public health departments, already overwhelmed from ten months of running every other aspect of pandemic response, needed more money and resources to simultaneously coordinate millions of vaccinations and communicate their importance. The needed money didn’t come until this month, and recommendations from the federal government have left a lot of room for interpretation—leaving state and local health agencies scrambling.

    And this first month was supposed to be the easy part! As The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang explains, early U.S. vaccination efforts were aimed at easy-to-reach people: those in hospitals, nursing homes, and other long-term care facilities. In these locations, it’s easy to quickly identify the most vulnerable patients and get them registered for vaccination appointments. The next groups of eligible Americans will not be so easy to reach. Doctors’ offices, pharmacies, and many other businesses will need to figure out vaccine logistics while also ramping up campaigns to convince people to even get vaccinated in the first place.

    (For a plain-language explanation of this issue that you can send to confused friends and relatives, I highly recommend the latest episode of the Sawbones podcast with Dr. Sydnee McElroy and Justin McElroy.)

    When I updated my vaccine data annotations yesterday, I added notes on how the vaccine rollout is progressing in each state. For the 38 states (and D.C.) now reporting vaccinations, you’ll find two new fields: the state’s vaccination phase (1A, 1B, etc.; 31 states are reporting this) and any prominently featured information on how residents can get vaccinated, such as a registration portal or contact information for local public health departments (at least 12 states are doing this).

    Please note that, while most states do not yet have state-wide vaccine registration portals, many local public health departments are setting up such portals at the regional and county level. I highly recommend searching for your local public health agency to see what they have available. Also, New Mexico, which has a registration portal but no vaccine data dashboard, is not included in the annotations.

    State data availability (as of Jan. 9)

    • 39 jurisdictions are reporting some form of COVID-19 vaccination data on a dedicated page or dashboard
    • 16 states are reporting race and ethnicity of vaccinated residents
    • 20 states are reporting age of vaccinated residents
    • 17 states are reporting gender or sex of vaccinated residents
    • 20 states are reporting vaccinations by county or a similar local jurisdiction
    • 31 states are reporting their vaccination phase (1A, 1B, etc.)
    • 12 states are prominently featuring information on how residents can get vaccinated, such as a registration portal or contact information for local public health departments

    More vaccine data news

    • Jurisdictions with new vaccine dashboards or pages include: Arkansas, Arizona, California, Washington D.C., Kansas, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
    • The CDC’s vaccination data are now available for download, via a table beneath the interactive dashboard. The agency updated its state-by-state data every weekday this past week—an improvement from the past two holiday weeks. A time series isn’t yet available, though.
    • Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker now has time series for both individual states and several countries which have begun administering vaccines. The states currently leading the pack for vaccinations per capita in the U.S. are West Virginia, the Dakotas, and Maine.
    • KFF has updated its COVID-19 Vaccination Monitor with polling data on vaccine hesitancy in rural America. Compared to urban and suburban residents, the foundation found, rural residents are significantly more hesitant. 31% of the rural residents sampled said they would “definitely get” a vaccine, compared to over 40% in other categories. Rural residents are also more likely to say they’re “not worried” that they or someone in their family will get sick with COVID-19.
    • NPR’s Selena Simmons-Duffin and Pien Huang surveyed experts to determine several major ways the U.S. could “jump start its sluggish vaccine rollout.” These include: more money for state and local health departments, more vaccine types (hopefully some easier-to-transport brands), massive administration sites, more regular supplies from the federal government, and public awareness campaigns.
    • The Trump administration is speeding up at least one thing: a plan to help pharmacies administer COVID-19 vaccines. According to POLITICO’s Rachel Roubein, almost 40,000 pharmacies are involved in the federal program, including those part of the Costco, Rite Aid, and Walmart chains. Pharmacies which are already used to administering flu vaccines each year—and already have huge patient databases—are strong candidates for the next phase of vaccine rollout.  
    • After some classic infighting from Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York state is moving to Phase 1B—meaning seniors and essential workers will start to see vaccinations. However, as City Councilmember Mark Levine pointed out on Twitter, the city has: “One website for H+H sites, another for DOHMH sites, another for Costco. For community clinics, 7 have their own different websites, 4 require calling, and 1 is by email.” (I want to get vaccinated at Costco, personally, if the opportunity arises.)
    • A Twitter thread from KFF Senior Vice President Jen Kates points out more of the methods states and counties are using to get residents signed up for vaccination appointments. They range from the expected online portals to SurveyMonkey and Eventbrite.

    Related posts

    • Sources and updates, November 12
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    • How is the CDC tracking the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines?
      Following the end of the federal public health emergency in May, the CDC has lost its authority to collect vaccination data from all state and local health agencies that keep immunization records. As a result, the CDC is no longer providing comprehensive vaccination numbers on its COVID-19 dashboards. But we still have some information about this year’s vaccination campaign, thanks to continued CDC efforts as well as reporting by other health agencies and research organizations.
    • Sources and updates, October 8
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      This week, the FDA authorized Novavax’s updated COVID-19 vaccine. Here’s why some people are excited to get Novavax’s vaccine this fall, as opposed to Pfizer’s or Moderna’s.

  • Vaccination data update, Jan. 3

    Despite the holidays, several more states began reporting vaccination data in the past week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) also made a huge update: this national dashboard is now posting vaccination counts at the state level.

    Here are the notable updates:

    • I launched a vaccination data page on the CDD site which includes annotations on ten major national sources and every state’s vaccination reporting. I’ll be updating it weekly—the most recent update was yesterday.
    • Five states have started regularly reporting vaccination data since December 27: Alabama, Alaska, Indiana, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. 32 total states are now reporting these data; 15 states are reporting race and ethnicity of vaccinated residents. See more details on the resource page.
    • On December 30, the CDC started reporting state-level vaccination data on its national COVID-19 dashboard. For every state, the CDC is reporting total vaccine doses distributed and total people who have received their first dose. The dashboard also includes national counts—both for the U.S. as a whole and for long-term care facilities. Data are not yet available for download. According to the most recent update (yesterday, January 2), 4.2 million Americans have received their first dose.
    • Drew Armstrong, the Bloomberg reporter who runs the publication’s vaccination dashboard, posted a vaccine data user guide on Twitter. While the Tweet thread primarily describes the methodology and design choices behind Bloomberg’s dashboard, it also provides useful context for vaccination data overall. Two notable details: all vaccination data lag (the CDC’s data lag by about 50 hours, according to Armstrong), and Bloomberg is working on making the underlying data behind their dashboard public.
    • Benjy Renton halted updates for the “Doses Administered” tracker on his Vaccine Allocation Dashboard. As the CDC is now providing standardized state counts—and Renton is a one-person tracking operation—he’s switching to focus on analyzing vaccination trends and accessibility.  
    • Distribution delays: Operation Warp Speed promised that, if the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines received Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA, 20 million Americans would get vaccine doses by the end of 2020. That clearly didn’t happen. What went wrong? To answer that question, I recommend two articles: this STAT News story and this CNN story. Both articles suggest that a lag in data reporting may be one reason why the current vaccination counts look so low. Still, there’s a big difference between 4.2 million and 20 million.
    • Vaccination and the new COVID-19 strain: As the B.1.1.7 coronavirus variant, identified in the U.K., becomes an increasingly ominous threat to America’s COVID-19 containment, vaccination becomes increasingly urgent. Zeynep Tufekci’s latest piece in The Atlantic explains the issue. One piece that stuck out to me: the U.S. doesn’t have good genomic surveillance—or, a system to systematically sequence the virus genomes for people infected with SARS-CoV-2—which makes us less equipped to see where the new strain is actually spreading. As Tufekci puts it: “we are flying without a map.”
    • One dose or two? Scientists and public health leaders have been debating changing our vaccination protocol. Should the U.S. stick to the script, so to speak, and reserve enough vaccine doses that everyone who receives one dose can receive a second in the prescribed time window? Or should we give as many people first doses as we can, accepting that some may not get a second dose for months—or at all? (The U.K. opted for the latter earlier this week.) University of Washington professor Carl Bergstrom has compiled some Twitter threads that explain the debate. Dr. Fauci said on Friday that the U.S. will stick to the official two-dose regimen, but the scientific discourse will likely continue.

    Related posts

    • Sources and updates, November 12
      Sources and updates for the week of November 12 include new vaccination data, a rapid test receiving FDA approval, treatment guidelines, and more.
    • How is the CDC tracking the latest round of COVID-19 vaccines?
      Following the end of the federal public health emergency in May, the CDC has lost its authority to collect vaccination data from all state and local health agencies that keep immunization records. As a result, the CDC is no longer providing comprehensive vaccination numbers on its COVID-19 dashboards. But we still have some information about this year’s vaccination campaign, thanks to continued CDC efforts as well as reporting by other health agencies and research organizations.
    • Sources and updates, October 8
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    • COVID source shout-out: Novavax’s booster is now available
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  • CDC now reporting a vaccination count (and other updates)

    CDC now reporting a vaccination count (and other updates)

    Screenshot of Bloomberg’s COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker, taken on December 26.

    Despite the holiday, many jurisdictions have begun reporting COVID-19 vaccination data since my last issue. Here are the major updates:

    • CDC added vaccinations to its dashboard: Mere hours after I published last week’s newsletter questioning when the federal government would release a national count of how many Americans had been vaccinated, the CDC began posting just that. The CDC COVID Data Tracker now includes both a count of how many vaccine doses have been distributed and a count of how many people have received their first dose—1.9 million as of Saturday, December 26. The count includes both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines, and incorporates reporting from states, local public health agencies, and federal entities including the Bureau of Prisons, Veterans Administration, and Indian Health Services. More detailed geographic and demographic data are not yet available from the CDC.
    • 27 states are now reporting COVID-19 vaccination data: While the COVID Tracking Project is not tracking vaccinations, the Project is keeping a running list of states that are reporting vaccine-related metrics. As of December 25, 27 states are reporting vaccine doses administered or another similar metric. Of the states reporting vaccinations, nine are reporting race and ethnicity of the residents vaccinated—that’s a huge jump from last Sunday, when only Florida was reporting this information. In other demographic metrics: 14 states are reporting age of those vaccinated, 10 are reporting sex or gender, and 14 are reporting county.
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    • How the COVID Tracking Project hopes vaccines will be tracked: In addition to its state dashboard annotations, the Project released a blog post last week detailing key information that Project leads believe should be prioritized by state and federal public health departments, as well as what states are reporting so far. Key metrics include: the number of people fully vaccinated (not just the number of doses administered), demographic data reported in absolute numbers (not percentages), county-level data, and data on vaccinations in long-term care facilities.
    • New Mexico will notify residents when they qualify for vaccination: This past Wednesday, the New Mexico Department of Health launched a website where state residents can sign up to learn when they will be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The sign-up form is currently somewhat confusing to use, as a new user must click “Schedule a New Appointment” to put in their contact details—even if they aren’t eligible for vaccination yet. Still, this effort to provide transparency about vaccination progress on such an individual level is unique among states thus far.
    • Our World in Data is tracking COVID-19 vaccinations worldwide: As of December 26, the open-source data repository Our World in Data is compiling vaccination counts from 10 countries: the U.S., the U.K., China, Russia, Israel, Canada, Bahrain, Chile, Mexico, and Costa Rica. So far, the U.S. has administered the most doses at 1.9 million, while Bahrain has administered the most doses when adjusted for population, at 3 doses for every 100 people.
    • Initial COVID-19 vaccine data in North Carolina reveals racial disparities: Samantha Kummerer, reporter for ABC11 in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, used the state’s early demographic data to draw attention to healthcare disparity. “When compared to the overall population of North Carolina, both Black and Latino communities are severely underrepresented in COVID-19 vaccination data,” Kummerer writes. She goes on to explain that these data reflect the hospital workforce in North Carolina, which was the first group to be vaccinated—and which is overwhelmingly white. This story reflects why it is so important for states to be transparent about their vaccination demographics, even at such an early stage of vaccine deployment.
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  • 15 states are reporting COVID-19 vaccination data—federal government lags behind

    15 states are reporting COVID-19 vaccination data—federal government lags behind

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    Back in September, I read the Interim COVID-19 Vaccination Playbook released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—the first national plan for how vaccination was supposed to proceed. Here’s an excerpt from my newsletter issue covering this playbook:

    Once COVID-19 vaccination begins, the CDC will report national vaccination data on a dashboard similar to the agency’s existing flu vaccination dashboard. According to the playbook, this dashboard will include estimates of the critical populations that will be prioritized for vaccination, locations of CDC-approved vaccine providers and their available supplies, and counts of how many vaccines have been administered.

    This past week, the first COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered to frontline healthcare workers across the country. The FDA issued Emergency Use Authorization to a second vaccine. But I haven’t seen a vaccination dashboard from the CDC; the closest we’ve come so far is a dataset listing initial allocations of Pfizer doses for every state. This federal agency is lagging behind several states that are making their vaccination counts public, as well as journalists who have already begun to compile the limited information that’s available.

    Here’s how the reporting of vaccination data is supposed to work. When someone goes in to get their COVID-19 shot, the provider of that shot will enter their name and other personal information to a state registry called an Immunization Information System, or IIS. Vaccine providers that issue shots and send data may include hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, pop-up vaccination sites, and any other institution that is giving shots.

    Most states and several large cities, like New York City, have these immunization registries; New Hampshire is still getting its registry ready to track COVID-19 vaccines. The registries stay private, with data only available for the people who ship, administer, and manage vaccines. A data system called the IZ gateway will help different state immunization systems link up with each other and with the CDC, which has asked all states to formally agree to share their data with this federal agency. (The CDC has asked states to share a pretty extensive list of data points for each vaccine patient, including names and addresses, which some states are not willing to send.)

    The CDC has also developed a system to help vaccine providers manage supplies and patients, a public-facing website that will help Americans see where they can get vaccinated, and a new software that will pull all vaccine-related information into one place for Operation Warp Speed officials to use. Finally, an HHS data system called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System will collect information on patient reactions to the vaccines, such as headaches and fatigue—both of which are expected reactions to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

    For more detail on these data systems, see this article by USA TODAY’s Aleszu Bajak and Janet Loehrke, which I drew upon to write this part of the newsletter.

    Theoretically, the CDC should have precise counts of how many people have received vaccine doses in every state, as well as personal identifying information for all of those people. So far, however, it appears that many states are beginning to make these data public, while the federal government has yet to release national numbers.

    According to ongoing analysis by the COVID Tracking Project, 15 states are reporting some form of vaccination data as of December 19. Here’s the breakdown:

    • Five states have added a count of vaccine doses administered as a single metric on their dashboards: Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island.
    • Two states have added vaccination-specific pages to their dashboards: South Dakota and Utah.
    • Three states have built entirely new dashboards for vaccination: Michigan, Ohio, and Texas.
    • Florida is releasing daily vaccination reports.
    • Four states are reporting vaccine-related metrics (such as counts of approved providers and doses delivered) that don’t yet include actual counts of the doses administered: Minnesota, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Tennessee.
    • Five states are reporting some form of demographic data: Michigan reports vaccinations by age; Texas reports by county; Utah reports by local health jurisdiction; Ohio reports by age and county; South Dakota reports by age, gender, and county; and Florida reports by race, age, gender, and county.

    For links to all of these states’ dashboards and reports, see the COVID Tracking Project’s annotations.

    Florida is the only state to report vaccination counts broken down by race so far, though the state has not yet reported such counts for different ethnicities. Public health experts have widely agreed that people of color—especially Black Americans, Native Americans, and Hispanic/Latino Americans—should be prioritized in COVID-19 vaccination because these communities have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. But without knowing vaccination rates in these vulnerable communities, it will be impossible to determine whether they are receiving the medical treatment they deserve.

    A recent article by ProPublica’s Caroline Chen, Ryan Gabrielson, and Topher Sanders calls attention to the lack of standardization that currently exists for state collection of race and ethnicity data:

    In state vaccination registries, race and ethnicity fields are simply considered “nice to have,” explained Mitchel Rothholz, chief of governance and state affiliates for the American Pharmacists Association. While other fields are mandatory, such as the patient’s contact information and date of birth, leaving race and ethnicity blank “won’t keep a provider from submitting the data if they don’t have it.”

    In other words, if a Black woman gets the Moderna vaccine at a Walgreens in Brooklyn, she could feel uncomfortable disclosing her race on the pharmacy’s form—and little action would be taken to explain to her why such disclosure is important and how her information would be used. The “race” checkbox on her form would be left blank. She would likely go uncounted by researchers and journalists trying to hold the government accountable to its promises of equity.

    The federal government should be both more rigorous in requiring race and ethnicity data and more transparent in disclosing these data—but I’d take a simple, national count of how many people in America have received COVID-19 shots to start. Recent data releases from the HHS have made me pretty optimistic about the federal public health agency’s ability to be transparent (see: the next two sections of this issue.) But the lack of a federal dataset so far means that key COVID-19 information is once again scattered.

    In a Poynter webinar last week, Al Thompkins asked a panel of top infectious disease experts—including scientists on both the FDA’s and the CDC’s vaccine advisory panels—a simple question: Will the public be able to see counts of how many people are getting vaccinated? None of those experts had a clear answer. There may be a dashboard in the works behind the scenes of which the panelists hadn’t been informed, but their responses still did not inspire confidence.

    Of course, journalists are once again stepping in to cobble together vaccination counts from all the public sources they can find. Bloomberg has counted 211,000 Pfizer doses in the U.S., as of December 19, by compiling numbers from state websites, press conferences, and interviews. The New York Times has surveyed state public health departments. Benjy Renton continues to update a Tableau dashboard that compares planned Pfizer and Moderna shipments to state populations.

    And the Kaiser Family Foundation released its COVID-19 Vaccine Monitor, an ongoing project to track public perception of and experiences with vaccination. The latest survey from this monitor shows that 71% of Americans would “definitely or probably” get a vaccine for COVID-19 if it was determined to be safe and freely available.

    This week, as I’ve seen the vaccination numbers—and the photos of frontline healthcare workers getting these well-deserved shots—I’ve felt something strange. Something hopeful. For the first time since March, I’m looking at numbers that I actually want to see go up. Now, if we could just get more comprehensive numbers, and get them more standardized, and get them reported with a priority on racial justice…

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  • Vaccines are shipping out, but is the U.S. ready to track them?

    Vaccines are shipping out, but is the U.S. ready to track them?

    This past Friday, the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) officially issued Emergency Use Authorization for America’s first COVID-19 vaccine. This is a monumental achievement. One year ago, no Americans had even heard of the novel coronavirus; now, the federal government is beginning to ship out vaccine doses for our frontline healthcare workers.

    But as excitement builds, so do concerns about the nation’s capacity to deploy vaccine doses to all who need them. The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang wrote this week that we are entering a phase of “vaccine purgatory,” in which a myriad of challenges could delay the country’s path to herd immunity. Already, four states are claiming that they will be unable to start administering vaccinations until January, while several other states have deferred the decision about who gets a shot first to healthcare providers. While the CDC has issued guidances, many logistics are left up to states—the same type of fractured system which has prevented America from getting its testing under control.

    True to my beat, I am most concerned about vaccine data. Earlier this week, the New York Times’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported that some states are refusing to report vaccination data to the CDC.

    Historically, each state has tracked vaccinations independently, through Immunization Information Systems (or IIS). While the CDC does report some national immunization information, such as its flu vaccination dashboard, this information typically comes from outside surveys and is not reported in real-time. Of course, this won’t do for COVID-19. To build up a national system, the CDC has asked every state to sign a Data Use and Sharing Agreement promising to send vaccination counts and associated demographic data to the CDC.

    It seems simple, right? But according to Stolberg’s reporting, the CDC has asked states to send personal information—such as names, birth dates, ethnicities, and home addresses—for each vaccine recipient. While demographic information should be tracked for COVID-19 vaccines in order to monitor equity in distribution, there is no need for the CDC to collect such specific information as names or home addresses. In fact, such a practice both discourages people from getting vaccinated and discourages states from cooperating with the federal public health agency.

    Stolberg quotes an official from Minnesota who is concerned about privacy:

    In Minnesota, officials are refusing to report any identifying details to the C.D.C., but they will submit “de-identified doses-administered data” on a daily basis once the vaccine campaigns begin.

    “This is a new activity for us, as we don’t typically report this level of detail on this frequency to the federal government,” Doug Schultz, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health, said in an email. He added, “We will not be reporting name, ZIP code, race, ethnicity or address.”

    States which refuse to send personal data to the federal government may still report anonymous demographic information, such as the races and ethnicities of individuals who get vaccinated, on state-level dashboards. But it seems increasingly likely that vaccination data will face the same challenges as testing data: with every state deciding on a different reporting practice, it could be difficult to standardize and answer basic questions at the national level.

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    Other vaccine data news and resources from this week:

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