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Some prioritization formulas also conflict with each other or impose prescriptive rules such as hamper vaccinations, public health experts say. Yet many Americans may not be aware of the layers of algorithms that influence their access to vaccines.
Ellen P. Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies how governments use automated decision-making systems, said algorithms were needed to effectively allocate vaccines. But public agencies and health centers should be transparent about prioritization formulas, she added.
“We want to know who is using them, what they are trying to do, who owns the proprietary algorithms, if they are audited,” she says.
Vaccine prioritization formulas are broadly divided into three levels: federal, state, and local. At the highest level, Operation Warp Speed - a multi-agency federal effort, created by the Trump administration – has handled nationwide vaccine distribution through Tiberius, an online portal developed by Palantir, the drug giant. data mining. The Biden administration, which withdrew the name from the program, has taken over and is continuing the effort.
To distribute the doses, federal administrators use a simple algorithm. It automatically divides the total amount of vaccine available each week among the 50 states – as well as the U.S. territories and a few large cities like New York – based on the number of people over 18 in each location.
Some health officials and researchers, however, have described Tiberius’ algorithm as a black box.
“Why can’t they make public the methods they use to make these estimates?” said Dr Rebecca Weintraub, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, co-author of a recent study on state vaccination plans. “Why are states getting a different number of doses than expected per week?”
States began to warn of Tiberius’ inconvenience last fall. In interim vaccination plans filed with the CDC, some public health administrators complained that the platform seemed too heavy and that the algorithm’s weekly assignments would make it difficult to plan multi-month vaccination campaigns. .
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