Availability: Vaccination (COVID-19)

To what extent is COVID-19 vaccination information available as open data?

Definitions

Definitions and Identification

Data about COVID-19 vaccines and vaccination should be specific and detailed regarding aspects such as number and type of doses available and administered, as well as what percentage of total doses this represents; it should provide basic demographic information about who is being vaccinated, such as age, sex, disability, and membership in a marginalized population; and it should include information regarding where vaccination is taking place and how the process is distributed across the country.

Among other functions, it should be possible for different actors to use data about vaccines and vaccination in various ways:

• to track the state of vaccination in the country and the degree of presumptive COVID-19 immunity;
• to assess and update public health restrictions such as lockdowns, travel restrictions, mask mandates, or distancing, as appropriate;
• to determine if vaccination is occurring equitably;
• to support analysis of the duration, efficacy, and other aspects of the various vaccines;
• to plan for the eradication of COVID-19.

Research Guidance

Starting points

• Sources:
  • Our World in Data provides a list of sources by country for data on vaccinations.
• Search:
  • National or sub-national government websites about how and where to go for vaccination, testing, or treatment of COVID-19.
  • Websites of civil society organizations or mutual aid societies that provide information about vaccination, testing, or treatment of COVID-19.
  • Websites of your country's national or local public health department, center for disease control, or center for health statistics.
• Consult:
  • Public health officials.
  • Open data experts, programmers, and technologists who have organized data collaboratives or participated in other data-related efforts for COVID-19 response and recovery.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

• Does the data include specific details about vaccine supply and administration, or does it only offer very general information? For example, does it include the number of doses that health authorities possess and of what type; the number of doses administered, broken into partial and complete vaccination; and the percent of total doses administered?
• Does the data include demographic information about the people who have been vaccinated? If so, what kinds? For example, it might include information about age, sex, disability, membership in a marginalized population.
• Does the data include information about the geographic distribution of vaccinations? For example, does it include vaccinations by county, or perhaps by facility?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries, data about COVID-19 vaccinations may be generated and published at the sub-national level, carried out by individual states, regions, or cities.

Focus on national government first, and then assess whether:

• National datasets also include data from sub-national or local government units;
• Equivalent data exists for a selection of sub-national or local government units, but is not nationally aggregated;

To assess countries where data about COVID-19 vaccinations is organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice.

Question sub-components

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

• Is this data available online in any form?
  • Data is not available online.

    Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).

  • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.

    Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

  • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.

    Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

• Data fields and quality:

• The data includes specific details on vaccine supply and administration, such as number of doses in possession and of what type, number of doses administered (this may be broken into partial and complete vaccination), and percent of total doses administered. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where details of vaccine supply are located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about the geographic distribution of vaccinations. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where data on its geographic distribution located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about the age of the people who have been vaccinated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where data on age of vaccinated people is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about the sex and/or gender of the people who have been vaccinated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where information about the sex of people who have been vaccinated is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about the disability status of the people who have been vaccinated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where information about disability of people who have been vaccinated is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about membership in a marginalized population among the people who have been vaccinated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where information about membership in a marginalized population among the people who have been vaccinated is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about vaccination for residents of long-term care facilities. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where information about vaccination for residents of long-term care facilities is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• The data includes information about vaccination for residents of prisons and jails. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: If COVID-19 vaccination data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where information about vaccination for residents of prisons and jails is located.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data openness, timing, and structure:

• Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

  If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

• Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

• There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

  If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

• Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

• Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

• Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

  If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

• The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

  If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

  If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

• Negative scoring:

• This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

  Supporting questions (conditional)

  If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

Extent

• How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.

    Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?

  • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.

    Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?

  • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Indicator Justification

Successfully managing and ending the COVID-19 pandemic is critical for ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages (SDG3). More specifically, SDG target 3.3 calls for combating communicable diseases, with specific attention to epidemics; vaccines and vaccination programs are fundamental to these efforts.

Responding effectively to the ongoing global health crisis requires accurate and timely vaccination data. The manufacture of vaccines is currently limited to comparatively few countries, and several such countries have adopted stances of vaccine nationalism, hoarding vaccines. Consequently, the global vaccine rollout is and will continue to be uneven. At the same time, the virus itself continues to change, producing new variants, and there is still much we do not yet know about the duration and efficacy of the existing vaccines. All of these factors make high-quality vaccination data even more important.

Further, within countries access to vaccines is frequently inequitable. As with testing and treatment, disparities are likely to track the social determinants of health; thus, for example, disparities may be correlated with location or demographic variables.