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It was the perfect good news story to get the EU rentrée off to an upbeat start — but the Commission’s announcement Tuesday that the Continent had hit its end-of-summer vaccination target has left health data experts scratching their heads.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hailed the milestone of fully immunizing 70 percent of adults as a “great achievement which really shows what we can do when we work together.”
The source of puzzlement among stats experts: The data from the EU’s own agency, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, appeared to show that the target had not yet been reached. Its tracking of the rollout showed 67.4 percent coverage on the day of the Commission’s announcement. In the meantime, this number has increased to 68.7 percent, but even this figure seems to be disputable.
To calculate the share of adults who have received the first and second jabs or remain unvaccinated, you need two variables — the number of administered vaccine doses and the number of adults in each EU country. The ECDC publishes detailed data, listing the number of vaccinations by age groups, which type of vaccine was used and whether it was the first or the second shot.
But trying to double-check the EU-wide share is not straightforward. One complication is that Germany and the Netherlands don’t report their vaccination coverage rates broken down by age group to the ECDC. The data are published on their respective national websites, though, so it is possible to fill in the gaps. Another complication is that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is a single shot, while the others require two doses.
But taking all this into account yields 245 million fully vaccinated adults. That’s around 11 million short of the figure the European Commission put out in its press statement Tuesday of “over 256 million.” Using the Eurostat population estimates by age group to calculate the number of adults in the EU in 2021 as a denominator results in an adult vaccination coverage of around 67 percent.
Our World in Data, which is trusted by international organizations, including the World Health Organization for its pandemic data, calculates that 57.7 percent of the EU’s entire population have been fully vaccinated as of August 31. The site’s Head of Data Edouard Mathieu is also skeptical that the EU has hit the magic 70 percent for the adult population. “Looking at the number of adults in the EU according to the latest U.N. population estimates and the number of fully vaccinated people in different age groups in the available datasets, it does not seem plausible that 70 percent of adults are fully vaccinated yet,” he said.
Asked about the apparent discrepancy, a European Commission spokesperson said that there is a lag of a few days in the data on the ECDC website and the corresponding public data set lag of several days. This would explain the lower number of registered vaccinations, the spokesperson noted.
The ECDC also acknowledges this data-lag on its site: “EU/EEA countries may upload data at any time, but as a minimum they are requested to report twice a week (on Tuesdays and Thursdays). The data in the tracker are refreshed at 11h, Monday to Friday. Considering this reporting timeframe and the time ECDC needs to process the data, some discrepancies may be observed between the figures published by ECDC and the ones presented in official national reports or web sites.”
So the figures are not fully up to date every day. But these fairly short delays in incorporating data would not be big enough to explain a data lag in the overall vaccination figure of 11 million.
The irony is that the highly infectious Delta variant now spreading rapidly across Europe cares little about the arbitrary 70 percent figure. With Delta able to infect fully vaccinated people and reproduce at a higher rate, the concept of a threshold for herd immunity may no longer hold at all — even though the vaccines remain highly effective at preventing serious disease and deaths.
Could it be that to create a PR splash around the EU hitting an arbitrary vaccination target by an arbitrary end of August date, the Commission did some statistical gymnastics with its official ECDC data? Surely not.
This article is part of POLITICO’s premium policy service: Pro Health Care. From drug pricing, EMA, vaccines, pharma and more, our specialized journalists keep you on top of the topics driving the health care policy agenda. Email [email protected] for a complimentary trial.
Source: Politico
