Here are the States With the Best — and Worst — Vaccination Track Records

David Ingram and Phil McCausland and Elliott Ramos
Wed, February 24, 2021, 10:07 AM

Dr. Karen Landers, an assistant state health officer in Alabama, said it was clear her state needed to turn around its Covid-19 vaccination program on the day in early January when its telephone hotline got a few more calls than expected.

“It crashed,” Landers said.

The state had set up the hotline to receive as many as 165 calls at a time, she said, but on the first day, it reported getting 1.1 million calls, quickly overwhelming the system and drawing scrutiny from local media.

“People weren’t getting serviced and couldn’t get their appointments made,” Landers said. “Even though we were trying to provide all the information we could on social media and other ways, we realized that wasn’t satisfactory to the people of Alabama.”

The numbers weren’t flattering to the state, either. In mid-January, Alabama had administered about 1 in 5 vaccine doses distributed to the state, and Alabama has often ranked among the slowest states as measured by the number of doses administered per 100,000 people.

The picture nationwide showed a yawning gap between some states that were doing well and others that were lagging far behind, Alabama among them.
But in the weeks since, that gap has significantly narrowed. While a few states are outliers on either end, the vast majority of states are now at roughly the same level, according to an NBC News analysis of state vaccination data. Of the 50 states, 44 have administered 70 percent to 90 percent of the doses that have been distributed to them.

In other words, a smaller proportion of doses are going unused on freezer shelves, and states are clustering around a national average of having used 79 percent of doses given to them.

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