The President of the Government has boasted through his Twitter account of the progress of the vaccination process in Spain, but as is usual in him, he has done it lying and offering incomplete data.
Pedro Sanchez Has published a tweet in which he presumes that Spain is “the first country in the world with the highest percentage of the population with one or two doses.” In addition to the regrettable writing skills, the data is not true.
Vaccination in Spain advances unstoppably thanks to the work of health professionals. More than 29M people have the complete guideline and we rank as the first country in the world with the highest percentage of the population with one or two doses. We continue!https://t.co/uL1L0Uq8vd pic.twitter.com/SR4pBgM3MI
– Pedro Sánchez (@sanchezcastejon) August 13, 2021
To support his assertion the president links to the Our World in Data page which is undoubtedly one of the most reliable sources in the world to consult this type of data. Once we follow the link we see a graph in which Spain, indeed, appears as the country with the highest percentage of vaccinated of the world.
What is the problem, then? Well, the graph presented by Sánchez is very incomplete because only includes information for a few countries And, when completing the data – the Our world in data tool allows us to do so – it turns out that Spain falls from the first position to the eighth, surpassed by Malta, the United Arab Emirates, Iceland, Qatar, Uruguay, Denmark and Portugal, as you can see in this more complete graphic.
It is true that all these countries are considerably smaller than Spain and that our country does lead the world rankings If we take into account only those that exceed a certain size, but none of what is ahead of us is a microstate -the smallest is Iceland with almost 350,000 inhabitants- and, furthermore, countries like the United Kingdom could say the same about us, which has 20 million more inhabitants than Spain and is only three points behind in the vaccination rate or, of course, the United States, which has eight times the Spanish population.
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