Current Events > Millions more Americans may be unvaccinated than previously thought

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The U.S. government has over-counted the number of Americans who are at least partly vaccinated against the coronavirus, state officials warn, meaning millions more people are unprotected as the pandemics winter surge gathers steam.

Last weekend, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised a bellwether metric -- the share of people 65 and older with at least one shot. The agency reduced the proportion from 99.9%, where it had been capped for weeks, to 95%, without changing its raw shot totals.

The move acknowledged a dynamic state officials have discovered: in collating reams of data on vaccinations, the U.S. has counted too many shots as first doses when they are instead second doses or booster shots.

CDC data show 240 million people with at least one shot, or about 72.5% of the population. But the agency says only 203 million are fully vaccinated, or 61.3%, an 11-percentage-point difference that is far larger than in other developed countries.

State and local officials say its improbable that 37 million Americans got one shot without completing their inoculations. Instead, they say, the government has regularly and incorrectly counted booster shots and second doses as first doses.

That means both the fully vaccinated and completely unvaccinated are officially undercounted. The precise number miscounted is unknown, but revisions in data from three states -- Illinois, Pennsylvania and West Virginia -- found enough over-counting of first shots to indicate millions of unvaccinated people nationally whove mistakenly been counted as having received a dose.

Changes to national data on the scale of Pennsylvanias revisions, for example, would mean increasing the number of Americans who are unvaccinated by more than 10 million.

The truth is, we have no idea, said Clay Marsh, West Virginias Covid czar.
The White House referred questions about the over-count of first shots to the CDC, whose spokespeople didnt respond to repeated inquiries.

that is far larger than in other developed countries.

That's a pretty big fuck up

Not looking so developed now are we?