Introduction
Vaccination frequently appears in the news due to prominent anti-vaxxer movements, and due to preventable disease outbreaks, such as measles, in states like Washington, New York, and California. Though the effectiveness of vaccination is well-established science, various groups continue to resist vaccination for various reasons, such as personal and religious beliefs. Data about vaccination rates, exemption rates, and vaccination-related (or lack thereof) disease outbreaks exists from sources such as the CDC and state-level Departments of Health, but this data is not centralized or normalized, due to the high variance in policies across states, counties, and localized areas, and due to the variance of recommended vaccines and their accompanying administration schedules. Additionally, as some states start to pass new vaccination laws to counter disease outbreaks (such as Washington’s HB 1638), it’s becoming increasingly important to understand the vaccination landscape, and how it intersects with legislation, research, freedom of expression, and public health.
For the purposes of this project, the VaxStats repository will focus on immunization and vaccination data for school-age children in the Pacific Northwest (PNW), specifically the states of Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. Data of particular interest includes vaccination and exemption rates, types of vaccines administered, and recommended vaccine schedules.
Repository Goals
To fully understand how vaccination rates and disease outbreaks are related, and in order to prevent them in future, the VaxStats repository aims to:
Provide a central repository for all vaccination data on school age children in the PNW, as well as related data like outbreak data and policy data
Establish collection standards that allow disparate vaccination datasets to be discovered and compared
Allow users to visualize multiple layers of data at once, through curation of data to improve interoperability and machine readability
View our data repository on Github.
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