Over 30,000 Mississippians get stories like this delivered to their inboxes for free.
Sign up for The Today, our daily newsletter, and continue to read this story.
Gov. Tate Reeves, on national television on Friday, was confronted with two troubling statistics: Mississippi has fully vaccinated just 14% of the state’s residents and ranks 47th in the nation in administering the COVID-19 vaccines that the state has received.
That data — widely reported by Mississippi Today and other state and national outlets — comes from the Mississippi State Department of Health, which Reeves has heavily relied on the past year, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Pressed during the live CNBC interview on why those numbers are so low, Reeves pushed back, saying, “Actually, I don’t think those numbers are accurate.” The governor said federal agencies like the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs are administering vaccines and not reporting the data to the state.
“I think the difference in being 20th or 40th (in the nation) is just a couple percentage points, and once we get accurate data in the system… what you’ll find is we’re going to be middle of the pack in terms of total vaccines distributed,” Reeves said.
MAP: Where to get the COVID-19 vaccine in Mississippi
Health care experts, including State Health Officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs, have discussed that many providers in Mississippi who have administered vaccines — particularly small clinics in rural parts of the state — have not been quick to update the vaccine database. That delay may result, officials say, in lower-than-actual percentages of vaccines administered showing in the database.
Reeves on Monday said those lags could mean the state’s public reporting of vaccine data is as far as 10% behind actual shots administered. But that statement is speculation without the numbers to back it up.
According to the most recent data data from the CDC and MSDH, Mississippi has administered 1,134,883 of the 1,594,445 doses of COVID-19 vaccine that have been delivered to the state. That moves the state up one place in the national rankings reported earlier this week — now 46th in the percentage of doses administered.
Across Mississippi, 733,010 people — 24% of the state’s total population — have received at least their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine. More than 426,000 people have been fully inoculated since the state began distributing vaccines in December.
READ MORE: Frequently asked questions about COVID vaccines in Mississippi
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.