This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-4-7, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, as well as basic copy-edits, may have been made in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
CNN published this headline today:
That's nonsense, which anyone who follows the vaccine production schedules could have told the "health data editor" Deidre McPhillips if she'd bothered to check the story with somebody knowledgeable before publishing.
"Some states may fully vaccinate all willing adults by June, but for others, it may take until the end of the year, a CNN analysis of federal data shows."
The unfortunate thing is that not only is this "analysis" completely confused, there's enough information in the article itself to see that it's not right.
Let's start with the small error, and then tackle the larger error.
"Georgia and Alabama are vaccinating their populations at the slowest pace -- fewer than 300 people fully vaccinated per 100,000 residents each day. In both states, about 75% of adults have been vaccinated or plan to be which would take the vaccination timeline into October for Alabama and November for Georgia."
Right off the bat, the most extreme example in the article extends to November, so that's not all year. That's the small error -- a month or two of exaggeration.
But if we retrace the math, we can find the bigger error.
Georgia has about 10.7 million residents, but only 8 million adults. If 75% of adults are vaccine-willing, like the article says, that means there's 6 million adults willing to get shots.
Next, let's mosey on down to the Georgia vaccines interactive dashboard, which tells us that 2.9 million Georgians have already got at least one shot (here).
That means there are about 3.1 million Georgians left to vaccinate. Let's round it up to 3.2 million because 16 and 17-year olds are eligible too, even though they're a tiny fragment of the population.
So how long is it going to take to vaccinate those 3.1 million? Well, if you look at a handy vaccine-tracking website (here), Georgia took about 17 days to give its last million doses. Tying one arm behind our backs and excluding Johnson and Johnson for a moment, that rate would mean 102 days to fully vaccinate another 3.1 million people.
By those numbers, everyone in Georgia who wants it would be vaccinated by July 18th, even excluding the fact that Johnson and Johnson only takes one shot, and assuming that there is no increase in the pace of vaccinations in Georgia.
Even those assumptions are too pessimistic. For example, there is a factory that currently contains 135 million doses of Johnson and Johnson vaccine, just waiting for federal approval to ship them. All it would take is the federal goverment signing off on that factory, and we would instantly have more doses than there are adults willing to take them. And even though that factory hasn't shipped any doses yet, the national rate of vaccination keeps climbing from other sources.
The funny thing about all this is that the very beginning of the CNN article reads like so:
"President Joe Biden said Tuesday that he expected all states to open Covid-19 vaccine eligibility to all adults by April 19, and at the current pace of vaccination -- about 3 million doses administered each day -- every adult in the United States could be vaccinated by mid-summer."
So the journalist knew already that we're on pace to vaccinate every adult in the US by mid-summer, and then somehow managed to bungle the math hard enough to push mid-summer back all the way to November, and then apparently got confused and thought November was the end of the year.
Even if it was true -- and it's not -- that the current rate of vaccination in Georgia is not fact enough to vaccinate every willing adult long before the end of the year, is it really reasonable to think that the rest of the country would get vaccinated by mid-summer, vaccine production would have hundreds of millions of extra doses, and no one would figure out how to get those doses to Georgia by the end of the year? No. It's a ridiculous idea.
I can think of two possible interpretations of this. One is that Deirdre McPhillips is badly out of her depth, tried to figure out what was going on with the national vaccination stats, and then accidentally mangled the whole "analysis" really badly. In that case, she's doing her job very badly, and should find some other line of work, one that doesn't involve doing math. The other is that the headline is being written because scary headlines sell well, and if that's the case then she's doing her job very well, but her job isn't journalism.
I'm not sure which interpretation is worse. I am reminded of the White House Correspondence Dinner where then-President Obama said, "Jake Tapper recently left journalism to work for CNN."
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