How many Americans are actually vaccinated against covid-19?

Millions of Americans are now eligible for a second covid-19 booster shot. By all accounts, efforts to vaccinate older people in many states have gone well — unbelievably well, in fact. According to official Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) counts of vaccinations among those above age 65 as compared with census data, 117 percent of those in that demographic in Massachusetts have had at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccine. New Hampshire would show that no less than 140 percent of that group are vaccinated. Buried deeper in the CDC website is an explanation of why the figures are so weird: Sometimes the data that the CDC has access to fail to link individuals to doses. This means that first doses are overestimated, because second and third doses are attributed as being a first dose for someone else. These reporting challenges will only get worse as people line up for a second booster shot. Very likely, the CDC’s underlying figures will soon show that more than 100 percent of those above age 65 across every U.S. state have had at least one shot. The bigger issue here is that all the data we have on U.S. vaccinations are subject to these distortions.