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AI incident #104 ·

California's Algorithm Considered ZIP Codes in Vaccine Distribution, Allegedly Excluding Low-Income Neighborhoods and Communities of Color

Open on the AI Incident Database 1 news report Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

What happened

California's vaccine-distribution algorithm used ZIP codes as opposed to census tracts in its decision-making, which critics said undermined equity and access for vulnerable communities who are largely low-income, underserved neighborhoods with low Healthy Places Index scores.

Only the incident metadata is stored here. The underlying news reports are on the AI Incident Database (CC BY-SA 4.0); use the links above to read them.

News reports (1)

Coverage catalogued by the AI Incident Database. Titles link to the original publisher; the text is not reproduced here.

  1. California's “Equity” Algorithm Could Leave 2 Million Struggling Californians Without Additional Vaccine Supply
    aclunc.org · Jacob Snow · AIID #1407

Who was involved

Alleged developer
Blue Shield Of California
Alleged harmed party
California Low Income Neighborhoods, California Communities Of Color

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Unintentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
none
Sectors
public administration, human health and social work activities
Countries
US

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 1.1.

  • Discrimination

    "Discrimination - Unfair or inadequate treatment or arbitrary distinction based on a person’s race, ethnicity, age, gender, sexual preference, religion, national origin, marital status, disability, language, or other pro...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Harms of Representation and Other Biases

    "A pretrained LLM generally has many of the stereotypical biases commonly present in the human society (Touvron et al., 2023). This makes it difficult for users to trust that LLMs will work well for them and not produce...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Risks from bias and underrepresentation

    "The outputs and impacts of general- purpose AI systems can be biased with respect to various aspects of human identity, including race, gender, culture, age, and disability. This creates risks in high- stakes domains su...

    International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (Bengio2024)

  • Bias

    "General-purpose AI systems can amplify social and political biases, causing concrete harm. They frequently display biases with respect to race, gender, culture, age, disability, political opinion, or other aspects of hu...

    International AI Safety Report 2025 (Bengio2025)

  • Bias

    "The training datasets of LLMs may contain biased information that leads LLMs to generate outputs with social biases"

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Toxicity and Bias Tendencies

    "Extensive data collection in LLMs brings toxic content and stereotypical bias into the training data."

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Biased Training Data

    "Compared with the definition of toxicity, the definition of bias is more subjective and contextdependent. Based on previous work [97], [101], we describe the bias as disparities that could raise demographic differences...

    Risk Taxonomy, Mitigation, and Assessment Benchmarks of Large Language Model Systems (Cui2024)

  • Broken systems

    "These are the most mentioned cases. They refer to situations where the algorithm or the training data lead to unreliable outputs. These systems frequently assign disproportionate weight to some variables, like race or g...

    Navigating the Landscape of AI Ethics and Responsibility (Cunha2023)

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