Every state is facing its own set of difficulties getting COVID-19 vaccines into people’s arms. And these challenges won’t disappear even as vaccine supplies increase, experts say.
In an op-ed published today by The Hill, Verily Life Sciences' Vivian Lee, M.D., and the Commonwealth Fund’s Eric Schneider, M.D., argue that years of underinvestment in the nation’s digital health infrastructure has left the United States wholly unprepared to collect, report, and share health data effectively. As evidenced by the nation’s often uncoordinated and inequitable vaccine rollout, we are now paying the price
for that underinvestment.
Lee and Schneider call for the creation of a national preparedness information and surveillance system to track in real time the health effects of a public health crisis. “We have learned multiple lessons from this crisis and seen throughout how important data are to our lives, our health, and our ability to recover,” they write. | 
