Caveats in reporting of national vaccine uptake

Millington, Tristan and Morrison, Kirsty and Jeffrey, Karen and Sullivan, Christopher and Kurdi, Amanj and Fagbamigbe, Adeniyi Francis and Swallow, Ben and Shi, Ting and Shah, Syed Ahmar and Kerr, Steven and Simpson, Colin R and Ritchie, Sir Lewis D and Robertson, Chris and Sheikh, Sir Aziz and Rudan, Igor (2024) Caveats in reporting of national vaccine uptake. Journal of Global Health, 14. 03006. ISSN 2047-2978 (https://doi.org/10.7189/jogh.14.03006)

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Abstract

During the work of the Early Pandemic Evaluation and Enhanced Surveillance of COVID-19 (EAVE II) group, we reported on vaccine uptake, safety, effectiveness, and waning in specific age groups in Scotland (e.g., 12-17 years) to enable policymakers to make decisions based on evidence generated nearly in real-time [1]. At first, these imperatives appeared methodologically straightforward. However, we soon realised that the seemingly simplest task in theory – i.e., reporting the vaccine uptake – was in fact challenging in practice. We report several caveats that need to be considered when reporting vaccine uptake for a specific age-group at a national level. We also propose a simple stepwise approach for reporting the methods of calculating vaccine uptake in a specific age-group in the context of tracking a large population.

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