Jordan Abudayyeh, spokesman for Pritzker, said Illinois per capita was the largest population state in vaccinations administered in February – and did so “for the vast majority” of the month.
Experts said it was fair to compare states based on the total doses administered and adjusted for the population. However, they were divided on whether it makes sense to focus on a few weeks in February.
Hemi Tewarson, a senior fellow at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, said the February snapshot could be helpful in showing recent improvement after a sluggish start due to issues outside state control, such as delays with the federal pharmacy partnership program which was created to vaccinate those in nursing homes.
“If they started slowly in December or early January, it’s hard to catch up,” she said.
Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that while data from month to month is important for measuring a state’s progress internally, it is not as useful to make comparisons because it is not a complete picture of a state’s vaccination of vaccines.
Regardless, according to Pritzker’s metric Illinois, the lead among large states on total doses per capita in February applied only a few days of the month, based on our analysis of CDC figures cataloged by Our World in Data.
In support of Pritzker’s allegation, Abudayyeh sends us a screenshot of a spreadsheet with figures that she says took the governor’s office of the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccination detection. The spreadsheet compares how many doses were administered from 31 January to 11 February per 100,000 inhabitants in the ten most populous states.
These numbers could not be verified directly because the CDC’s tracker only provides a current cumulative total on each day.