H1N1/Swine Flu: State by State, Vaccination Rates Vary Wildly

April 1, 2010

The CDC today released some surprising MMWR statistics on H1N1/swine flu vaccination rates around the United States today. The regional variation, especially for children under 17, is striking, particularly amid news that less than half of the nearly 230 million vaccine doses available to Americans have been used, leaving a staggering surplus that's soon to expire.

Statewide vaccination rates among children veered from about 85 percent in Rhode Island to an embarrassingly low rate of 21% in Georgia.

Writes Elsevier Global Medical Network reporter Mitchel Zoler in a blog post:

As of now, the CDC really has no good explanation for what's been going on

The CDC offered some possible explanations for the states with high (H1N1 vaccination) rates: a focus on childhood vaccination, use of an existing childhood vaccination infrastructure, running school-based vaccine clinics, and better recognition of the value of vaccination by parents and providers. Among these, the school-based clinics got the biggest play today, but even that doesn't seem to tell the whole story. As the CDC's Dr. Anne Schuchat noted, most states had at least some school-based clinics.

It's worth checking out the CDC's H1N1 vaccination stats and the map here to see the rates in your state, and asking your local and state public health officials about them. This is good data to write about now and to tuck away for next year so you can make some comparisons: will we see any improvement in distribution next year?

Since our tax dollars paid for much of the vaccine and its distribution, journalists around the country should be watchdogging how well their public health systems fared in getting the vaccine to those who needed it most. And don't forget to ask what's going to happen to your state's unused H1N1 vaccine stockpile. How long will it last? What will be done with it, either before or after it expires?  

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