In Mississippi, an online vaccine registration system buckled in a sudden onslaught of traffic. Officials at a local health department in Georgia had to resort to counting every dose they receive before scheduling appointments. A US$44mil (RM177.87mil) national vaccine scheduling and tracking system is going largely unused by states.
The situation unfolding in the US, home of technology giants, frustrates an audience eager for the vaccinations. Furthermore, data gaps could distort the national picture of how efficiently vaccines are used if a certain number of doses administered are not counted.
“We feel it is a significant amount,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer at the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. “That becomes clearer as the data systems improve and we get a better idea of what we are missing.”
It is a situation that some officials saw coming. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in his testimony to Congress in September called “years of underinvestment” in public health systems. He then said that the Trump administration intended to help states plug gaps in IT capacity.