A Northeastern professor says the Centers for Disease Control has vastly overestimated the number of people who have received at least one vaccine for COVID-19, leading the federal agency to paint a rosier picture of vaccine compliance than exists in fact.
One of its authors Project for COVID Statesthe recent report on national vaccination rates; David Lazersays his report shows 75% of adults in the United States have received at least one coronavirus vaccination, compared to 92.1% reported by the CDC.
“That's a very, very big difference,” says Lazer, a distinguished professor of political science and computer science at Northeastern.
The CDC “says 8% of the population hasn't had any vaccine and we say 25%,” he says. “So we're saying that three times as many people have had zero vaccinations.”
“The reason for this is very simple,” says Lazer.
The CDC relies on information reported by states, which in some cases count people who get booster shots as separate people who get the first shots in the series, especially in cases where people forget to bring their immunization cards for boosters .
“It's not like they're collecting Social Security numbers” to verify data, Lazer says.
“We're basically saying that the population is much less protected than what the CDC says,” he says.
The COVID States Project's report – its 100th since its release in May 2020 – also shows that vaccination rates have hit highs over the past year and a half.
“He's just moving. It's not like we're converting all these vaccine-resistant people from October 2021. If you weren't vaccinated in October or November 2021, you're not vaccinated now,” Lazer says.
“The CDC data shows this very steady increase in people getting their first shot. The data is very skewed because the message you're getting is 'we're slowly winning the war on vaccine resistance,'” and that's not true, he says.
The report states that the areas with the highest vaccination rates are the Northeast, the West Coast and Hawaii. The areas with the lowest rates are in the South and a portion of contiguous western and midwestern states—North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho.
The COVID States Project drew on a survey of 25,000 people for its latest report, which also showed that less than a third of respondents received the bivalent booster.
The CDC's reliance on state reports means it underestimated the number of people receiving booster shots, Lazer says.
In every state, older adults were more likely to be vaccinated against COVID-19 than younger adults. But the CDC says more 65-year-olds have been shot than there are 65-year-olds in the U.S.
When it comes to reporting the percentage of people who completed the primary series of shots—either two shots of Pfizer or Moderna or one shot of Johnson & Johnson—the difference between the CDC and the COVID State Project rates is less stark.
The CDC says 79% of Americans have completed the first round of shots, while the COVID States Project estimates 73%.
Lazer says his research is more accurate than the CDC reports, but adds that it's not perfect.
“For example, we don't have a good sample of people in nursing homes,” he says. “If they have different vaccination rates, we're missing those people.”
The COVID State Project is a multi-university consortium of researchers originally funded by Northeastern University and the National Science Foundation.
As for the COVID-19 report, the project is ongoing, but it is slowing down and it can refocus its efforts on broader health policies, Lazer says.
“I don't think we can say that COVID is in the mirror enough, because it's still killing a lot of people every day, just a lot more quietly.”
Cynthia McCormick Hibbert is a reporter for Northeastern Global News. Email her at c.hibbert@northeastern.edu or connect with her on Twitter @HibbertCynthia
