Some prioritization formulas also conflict with each other or impose such prescriptive rules that make immunization difficult, say public health experts. Still, many Americans may not be aware of the layers of algorithms that influence their access to vaccines.
Ellen P. Goodman, a professor at Rutgers Law School who studies how governments use automated decision-making systems, said that algorithms are needed to deliver vaccines efficiently. But public agencies and health centers must be transparent about prioritization formulas, she added.
“We want to know who is using them, what they are trying to do, who has the proprietary algorithms, if they are audited,” she said.
The vaccine prioritization formulas are roughly divided into three levels: federal, state and local. At the top level, Operation Warp Speed ​​- a multi-agency federal effort created by the Trump administration – has achieved national distribution of vaccines through Tiberius, an online portal developed by Palantir, the data mining giant. The Biden government, which withdrew its name from the program, took over and continues the effort.
To split doses, federal administrators use a simple algorithm. It automatically divides the total amount of vaccine available each week between the 50 states – as well as U.S. territories and some large cities like New York – based on the number of people over 18 in each place.
Some health officials and researchers, however, described Tiberius’ algorithm as a black box.
“Why can’t they make public the methods they use to make these estimates?” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who co-authored a recent study on state vaccination plans. “Why are states getting a different number of doses than they expected per week?”
States began to warn of Tiberius’ disadvantages last fall. In provisional vaccine plans filed with the CDC, some state health administrators complained that the platform seemed overly complicated and that the weekly distributions of the algorithm would make it difficult to plan vaccination campaigns for months.