Estimating Current Vaccination Rates

By the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States

Key takeaways

Estimating current vaccination rates

This March 2023 report summarizes vaccination rates in the United States and compares estimates of vaccination rates from the COVID States Project (CSP), the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Key Findings

● Vaccination rates for the primary series of vaccinations have plateaued since the Fall of 2021. [In other words, Americans for some time stopped taking the original vaccine shots.]

● The regions with the highest vaccination rates are the Northeast and the West Coast plus Hawaii. The regions with the lowest rates are the South, and a block of adjacent states in the upper West/Midwest (the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho) [It appears that Democrats more favored the vaccines than Republicans.]

● Less than a third of respondents report getting the bivalent booster, with majorities in every state reporting not getting the bivalent booster. [Clearly the boosters have not been a success.]

● CDC data deviate quite substantially from survey-based measures (CSP and KFF) of vaccination rates. These deviations almost certainly reflect errors in the underlying official records used by the CDC, driven by the inability of states to link records of multiple shots to a given individual. Official data thus offer a distorted picture of the trends in vaccination rates in the country, and where those distortions have grown over time. [As the report details, CDC has overstated vaccine use]