parmsam / covid19-vaccine-dose-waste

covid19-vaccine-dose-waste-in-usa

Plots representing covid-19 vaccine dose waste in the USA embedded below. Note that there may be reporting bias (underreporting) in the data extract used (data had last refresh date of 2021-08-23). Dates represent wastage submission date in graphs below (not necessarily actual date of dose wasted which is unknown from data extract). Additionally, as MSNBC points out, a contributing factor to the waste is the way the vaccines are packaged with the Moderna vaccine having 15 doses per vial, Pfizer having 6 per vial, and J&J having 5 per vial.

Credit to a data scientist for filing a FOIA request with CDC for the dataset on vaccine waste. Links to data and original medium post below. Additionally, I would skim the recommended readings below, if interested in exploring further, since they provide additional context. The post from someweekendreading's blog is particularly insightful. Relative to other vaccine campaigns (see someweekendreading's blog post and the Revising_Wastage_Concept_Note.pdf), the estimated waste rates so far indicate that we're doing pretty well. Estimated costs info added via cost information from news article here.

R scripts used to process data in R/. Run load.R first then run analysis.R. Ensure packages are installed prior. If you're running the latest version of RStudio then you should get a notification to install missing packages. Not including original data in the repo, but the scripts will download/import the data and export a few graphs.

data source:

• https://anonymousdata.medium.com/the-cdc-reported-11-3-million-wasted-covid-19-vaccine-doses-in-8-months-5bdff71a850a
• https://adatascienti.st/cdc/wastage.xlsx (note that there are two sheets in the spreadsheet)
• https://adatascienti.st/cdc/wastage.ndjson.zip

recommended readings:

• https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/america-has-wasted-least-15-million-covid-vaccine-doses-march-n1278211
• https://www.someweekendreading.blog/vaccine-waste/
• https://anonymousdata.medium.com/the-cdc-reported-11-3-million-wasted-covid-19-vaccine-doses-in-8-months-5bdff71a850a
• https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/downloads/wastage-operational-summary.pdf
• https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total
• https://www.who.int/immunization/programmes_systems/supply_chain/resources/Revising_Wastage_Concept_Note.pdf?ua=1
• https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/pfizer-eyes-higher-covid-19-vaccine-prices-after-pandemic-exec-analyst
• https://www.propublica.org/article/covid-vaccine-wastage

ggplot2 graphics: