At first glance, America’s effort to protect its most at-risk citizens from the coronavirus has been an unalloyed success. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current tally indicates that 99.9 percent of those ages 65 and older have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, a remarkable accomplishment less than 12 months after vaccines first became available.
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But that figure is obviously flawed and almost certainly too high.
The numbers themselves reveal the problem, but we can also look at polling as a red flag. In YouGov’s most recent polling for the Economist, for example, 14 percent of those 65 and older say they will never get a dose of the vaccine. In Kaiser Family Foundation’s September poll, the figure was 8 percent. A range, but clearly higher than 0.1 percent in both cases. Perhaps this is in part a function of performative vaccine opposition, but given that Republicans are more likely to oppose the vaccine and older Americans skew Republican, it seems more likely that the 0.1 percent figure is wrong, not the 8 or the 14 percent ones.
Again, though, the CDC’s data itself reveals multiple problems. Its publicly available data file shows vaccine uptake by state over time. The cumulative daily total of seniors who’ve received at least one dose, according to those numbers, looks like this, comparing the number of recipients to the number of people 65 and older, according to 2019 population estimates.
Not to get too into the weeds, but those estimates are out of date. The way it works is that the Census Bureau counts the number of people in the country every 10 years and then, for each intervening year, produces a current estimate of the population. The 2019 estimate, then, is one based on a nine-year-old count. The Bureau released new state totals this year, based on the 2020 Census, and while it didn’t break that total down by age group, we can use the new total population to better estimate the number of seniors in the country and in each state.* If we compare the number of vaccine recipients to the 2020 population of seniors, the percentage drops by a percentage point.
This is the less problematic problem. The bigger problem is that, according to the CDC’s data, 19 states and D.C. have similarly vaccinated 99.9 percent of their populations. But among the other 31 states, only an average of 93.4 percent of seniors have been vaccinated.
Here’s how each state’s reported vaccination rates (one dose and full) compare. You can see those 20 states crammed right up against the 100 percent mark moving left to right.
If we look not at the CDC’s reported percentages, but instead compare the number of reported seniors who’ve received at least one dose of the vaccine to population estimates for 2019 and 2020, the problem becomes apparent. A number of states have kept adding new vaccine recipients despite being identified as having vaccinated 99.9 percent of their senior populations weeks ago. (You can see that the CDC-reported percentages generally track with the 2019 population estimates.)
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The CDC’s data report more than 1,000 occasions on which the number of first-dose recipients increases in a state while its vaccinated percentage holds steady at 99.9 percent. That includes nearly 350 days through September. Boosters were authorized for seniors only at the end of that month.
If we re-create our graph above using not the reported percentages but those calculated based on 2020 population estimates, the picture changes. States such as New Hampshire and Pennsylvania stand out: well over 120 percent of their estimated senior populations have received a dose of the vaccine according to the CDC!
This isn’t what Pennsylvania’s own data say, by the way. It has the most vaccinated age group in the state, those ages 70 to 74, 96.1 percent of whom have received at least one dose. Pennsylvania’s CDC data say it’s been over 100 percent for the past 152 days.
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New Hampshire’s numbers have been wrong since June, according to a report from New Hampshire Public Radio earlier this month. The reasons are complicated and heavily related to how the state aggregates and reports its own data. In part, the state’s health commissioner told the outlet, it seems that booster shots are being included in first-shot numbers. (New Hampshire has seen 82 days in which first-shot numbers have increased as the total percentage stayed flat; 25 of them were before June.)
This discrepancy is how we get 99.9 percent nationally despite having 30 states at an average of 93.4 percent for seniors. If we take out the doses in excess of 100 percent in any state from the national numbers, the total drops by 1.7 million vaccinations. The percentage of vaccine recipients among those 65 and older then falls to about 96 percent.
That’s not a more accurate number than the CDC’s 99.9 percent number, mind you. It’s just an indicator of how goofy the CDC’s figures are. Its current national total, for example, is that 54,970,421 seniors have received at least one dose of a vaccine. The Census Bureau estimated this summer that there were about 54 million seniors in the country in 2019, meaning that 101.7 percent of that number has been vaccinated — and that there were 55.7 million seniors in 2020, indicating that only 98.8 percent of seniors have been vaccinated.
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The reason this matters is both complex and simple. It’s complex because the CDC data are used as benchmarks for a number of other tracking efforts. It’s simple because protecting seniors means vaccinating them, and if anyone thinks that nearly everyone’s been vaccinated, the effort to vaccinate the unvaccinated is hampered.
Those people, then, remain at risk.
* To do so, we introduced our own error, applying the estimated percentage of seniors in the 2019 estimate to the 2020 population total. This is flawed because the density of seniors increased between the two years, as America grays. But that error doesn’t detract from the point.