Discussion of “COVID vaccine data quality, cleaning, and management”

Abstract The article by Dr. Rigdon et al. highlights the importance of assessing and addressing errors in collected data. One cannot make informed decisions if the data is incorrectly assumed to be complete and accurate. The authors share innovative and reasonable approaches to addressing “gaps” in the data in order to use the data for further research. This is critical for any work using this data to analyze the vaccination rates during the COVID pandemic. It also highlights questions about how such data is collected. Perhaps work such as this will lead us to rethink the decentralized approach to collecting health data across states (and sometimes by county within states) and the need to implement a standard approach to collecting and reporting health information.