Serbia has adopted an approval mechanism for vaccinations, giving citizens the option to choose which vaccine they want to get and in which location they want to get vaccinated.

This makes Serbia the only country in the world where citizens can choose the vaccine type, between shots from Pfizer-BioNTech, China’s Sinopharm or Russia’s Sputnik.

This is from Sara Mageit, “Serbia reaches one million vaccines with help of AI framework,” Healthcare IT News, February 23, 2021.

There are 6.9 million people in Serbia, of whom over one million have received their first dose of vaccine. That’s 14.5 percent of Serbia’s population.

Let’s compare that with the United States.

64 million doses have been distributed in the United States. 64 million is 19.4 percent of the U.S. population, which makes the U.S. look better than Serbia. But that would be if everyone who got a shot here got just one shot. Such a policy would be quite sensible. But it’s not the one that U.S. governments have chosen. 13.3 percent of the U.S. population have received at least one dose. 13.3 percent of 330 million is 43.9 million people.

So 20.1 million people in the United States have received 2 doses and 23.8 million have received 1 dose.

Since 2 doses isn’t much better than 1, a reasonable comparison would be between our 13.3 percent and Serbia’s 14.5 percent. In other words, almost a dead heat (because getting 2 doses is slightly better than 1 dose.)

Interestingly, 14 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia have populations in which the percent having received at least one vaccination exceeds 15 percent. 3 states (Colorado, Iowa, and Wisconsin) have exceeded 14% but not 15%.