Kansas says it’s working to fix vaccine reporting issues

Kansas officials say they are working to fix issues with the system that reports its vaccination data to the federal government. 

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly (D) said glitches within the state’s reporting system, Kansas WebIZ, were largely responsible for making it appear as though 100,000 doses of the vaccine had not been used even though they had, The Associated Press reported.

“We are bringing in the vendor who put WebIZ together to work on the technical fixes that need to be in place to smooth out that process,” said Kelly.

The state system won’t recognize that a vaccine has been administered if one facility gives another facility doses of the vaccine they need to carry out scheduled vaccinations. 

It also won’t register a vaccine has been administered if one field in the state system is left blank since it causes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to receive the data, officials said. 

Kelly believes most of the doses that are unaccounted for were, in fact, administered to patients.

“Our estimates are that at this point 70% of the quote-unquote unaccounted for doses appear to be doses that we can see have gone into somebody’s arm,” Marci Nielsen, an adviser to Kelly, said. “But we have to track each of them down.”

Kansas has only vaccinated 10% of its population, according to state data, which the AP reports is one of the lowest vaccination rates among the states, according to the AP. 

Other states have also been struggling with their state vaccination systems. New Jersey is currently blaming its Microsoft system for glitches that have caused vaccine scheduling issues in the state.

Nielsen said Kansas would likely have to use a workaround, as other states have, until the underlying issue with the reporting system is resolved.

States have been struggling with their vaccination rollouts, but millions of Americans are still receiving the vaccine that many hope will return the country back to the way it was before the pandemic.