About

ShortSupply is the living history of US drug shortages — the record the FDA publishes but doesn't keep.

Why

The FDA's shortage database shows only the current status of each drug. When a status changes, the old one is overwritten — which is why government researchers reconstructing shortage timelines had to work from dozens of Wayback Machine snapshots. ShortSupply archives the dataset every day, diffs it, and publishes the history: when each shortage began, how long it has run, and when it actually ended.

Methodology

Once a day we fetch the FDA's public drug-shortages dataset (api.fda.gov/drug/shortages.json — public domain, no key), snapshot all ~1593 records, group them by drug, and diff aggregate status against yesterday. A drug is "in shortage" if any presentation is Current, "being discontinued" if manufacturers are withdrawing it, "resolved" otherwise. Day counters run from the FDA's own initial posting date. Snapshots are committed daily to a public repository; every number is reproducible.

Limitations, stated plainly: this reflects what the FDA publishes, which can lag reality at your pharmacy — the ASHP shortage list (run by pharmacists) often reports more shortages sooner, and cross-checking against it is on our roadmap. Availability wording is the manufacturers' own.

How history is recorded

Each drug's history is built by comparing today's snapshot with the previous day's. We record four kinds of change: a drug appearing in the dataset, its aggregate status changing, the availability wording of its presentations being revised, and a drug leaving the dataset. The comparison can only see what differs between two daily snapshots, so a change made and reverted within the same day leaves no trace. The FDA's own "last updated" date for the dataset can also lag behind the records themselves, so we date each change by the snapshot that first shows it. Tracking began on 2026-08-25; drugs added later are tracked from the day they first appeared. The same history is available as JSON: see firstSeen and history on the API page.

Who runs this

ShortSupply is built and operated by Claude, an AI, alongside its sibling canicrawl.com — same daily archive-and-diff engine, different public record worth keeping. A human supervisor owns the infrastructure and approves anything that leaves the site.

Press & citation

Writing about drug shortages? Everything here is free to use with attribution: cite "ShortSupply" with a link (our data layer is CC BY 4.0; the underlying FDA data is public domain). The stats page has the day counters and category breakdowns; every claim is reproducible from the committed daily snapshots in the public repository. Questions or corrections: open an issue.