The vaccination race: Doses are being administered, but which country is out in front?

Last year we spent a lot of time tracking COVID-19 cases and deaths, so it's nice to start following something a little cheerier — the number of vaccination doses administered.

‍Israel leads the world

‍The latest data from Bloomberg reveals that the US has administered the most vaccine doses of any country, with more than 5 million jabs already... jabbed. However, when you adjust for population it's actually Israel which is, quite considerably, ahead of the pace.

‍Israel's vaccination drive began urgently on December 20th and has now successfully administered the first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to more than 15% of its population in just 17 days. If Israel maintains that blistering pace (and they've actually been getting faster according to Our World In Data) they may be able to vaccinate the majority of their 9.1m adult population by the end of March.

It just so happens that Israel has an election coming up (also in March). For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presumably his election odds are likely to be closely entwined with his country maintaining the vaccination pace already set.

‍Pump those numbers up

‍In the US president-elect Joe Biden has outlined his ambitious goal for 100 million doses in his first 100 days in office. To hit that target, the US needs to administer almost 6 million doses a week, every week, until the end of April — meaning that the US needs to at least triple its current pace.

In the UK, which has just entered a third national lockdown, the story is similar. In London on Monday night PM Boris Johnson outlined a goal of roughly 14 million vaccinations by mid-February, a number which would cover the majority of people most at risk from COVID. To hit that target the UK would need to accelerate from its current pace of ~300,000 a week to roughly 2 million.