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Alabama now has the lowest full COVID-19 vaccination rate in the country.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only 33.2% of Alabama’s total population is fully vaccinated. The state fell behind the Mississippi, which reached 33.3% after the state reported a sharp increase in completed vaccinations on Thursday.
Alabama started the last year in the vaccine rollout and had been penultimate in that extent in recent months, with only Mississippi having seen fewer completed vaccinations. Mississippi reported nearly 100,000 new fully vaccinated individuals to the CDC on Thursday, a jump of 3.3 percentage points.
The sudden increase there may have been caused by a delay in notifying the CDC, which could mean Mississippi has been ahead of Alabama for some time. As of Friday afternoon, the Mississippi Department of Health had yet to respond to questions about a possible backlog.
[Can’t see the chart? Click here.]
Alabama also does not report data every day – the state updates its COVID-19 vaccine dashboard only twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, although it appears the state is doing report daily to CDC. The Alabama Department of Public Health said on Friday there was no more backlog of vaccines reported since the July 4 vacation here.
And Alabama appears to be making gains in its deployment, at least when it comes to delivering that first shot. The state now leads Mississippi, Louisiana, Idaho and Wyoming in the percentage of the total population that has received at least one dose of a vaccine.
Whether Alabama is last or second from the bottom doesn’t really matter – the vaccine count is relatively low, which infectious disease experts say places it among the states most susceptible to have a new epidemic in the fall.
And the state currently has no plan to speed up the vaccination rate with incentives like lotteries.
Do you have an idea for an Alabama data story? Email Ramsey Archibald at [email protected], and follow him on Twitter @RamseyArchibald. Read more stories about Alabama data here.
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