Two widely followed surveys “significantly overestimated” how many American adults got their first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine last spring, says an article in the scientific journal Nature that was published online on Wednesday.
The surveys have large numbers of participants but nevertheless aren’t representative of the U.S. adult population, the article says. This flaw is a symptom of a bigger problem, which is the belief that asking lots of people to respond to a survey can make up for deficiencies in its design. It’s what one of the Nature authors, the statistician Xiao-Li Meng, calls the big data paradox. CONTINUED
Peter Coy, New York Times
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