Low-Visibility Mission

Data-tracking failures at the CDC are fueling political support for an overhaul of the agency

- Drew Armstrong

A year into the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, the U.S. government still faces data shortcomings that cloud its vision of who’s getting vaccinated and at what rate.

The record-time development of the shots was a (mostly) American triumph. Now vaccines are plentiful in the U.S. and offer meaningful protection for those who get them. But in another way the U.S. has lagged. America’s public-health authorities have struggled to monitor the rollout of vaccines and to track how effective they are.

The most recent example: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been overcounting the number of Americans who’ve received at least one dose of vaccine. The agency’s data are far offfrom what many states have been reporting on their own, meaning there are millions more unvaccinated than its numbers show.

That issue followed another a few weeks earlier. After the U.S. cleared Covid shots for kids age 5 to 11 at the start of November, it took the CDC almost three weeks to publish data on how many children had been vaccinated. In the meantime, an impatient White House started its own ad hoc data collection effort, assembling vaccination numbers for the age group from states and vaccine providers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Those problems are just the latest. This spring the U.S. stopped counting many vaccine breakthrough cases, information that was critical for deciding how and when to roll out boosters. And the government still lacks complete data on the race and ethnicity of vaccine recipients, despite the Biden administration making equity a cornerstone of its rollout.