Tag: vaccination rates
America is too depressed about COVID vaccines
The world has just seen the largest vaccination campaign in history. At least 13 billion COVID shots have been administered—more injections, by a sweeping margin, than there are human beings on the Earth. In the U.S. alone, millions of lives have been saved by a rollout of extraordinary scope. More than three-fifths of the population elected to receive the medicine even before it got its full approval from the FDA.
Yet the legacy of this achievement appears to be
America Created Its Own Booster Problems
By this point in the pandemic, the benefits of boosters seem pretty darn clear. Boosters continue the immune system’s education on the coronavirus, upping the quantity of defensive fighters available, while expanding the breadth of variants that vaccinated bodies can snipe at. During Omicron’s winter wave, people who received a booster were less likely to be infected, hospitalized, or killed by the virus than those without a boost; older people and other high-risk populations especially benefited from dosing up again.
A Stress Test for America’s New COVID Plan Is Coming
At this very moment, the United States, as a whole, remains in its legit pandemic lull. Coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations are lower than they’ve been since last summer. There’s now a nice, chonky gap between us and January’s Omicron peak.
And yet. Outbreaks have erupted across Asia. Massive swaths of Europe, including the United Kingdom—America’s best pandemic bellwether for much of 2021—are firmly in the grip of a more transmissible Omicron subvariant called BA.2 that’s been simmering stateside for
The Case Against Masks at School
In the panicked spring of 2020, as health officials scrambled to keep communities safe, they recommended various restrictions and interventions, sometimes in the absence of rigorous science supporting them. That was understandable at the time. Now, however, two years into this pandemic, keeping unproven measures in place is no longer justifiable. Although no district is likely to roll back COVID policies in the middle of the Omicron surge, at the top of the list of policies we should rethink once
Where Are All the COVID-Booster Incentives?
Unfortunately, Omicron is far from done with us. More than 700,000 Americans are testing positive for COVID-19 every day, COVID hospitalizations in the United States are at a record high, and the variant is so contagious that an encounter with it can be postponed for only so long. The single best thing people can do to protect themselves is, yes, get vaccinated. And that includes booster shots.
The immunity boost of that third shot is something of a game changer:
Penn State’s Pandemic Denialism – The Atlantic
As the fall 2021 semester approaches, nearly 700 college campuses across the United States are requiring proof of vaccination for students or employees. If you plot these colleges on a map, the image bears a striking resemblance to one depicting the results of the 2020 presidential election. And that image resembles a map of current COVID-19 hot spots, which mirrors a map of vaccination rates. In other words, vaccination rates lag behind in the areas where vaccinations are needed
Why America’s COVID-19 Vaccine Rates Are Plummeting
America’s vaccination rates have fallen off a cliff, and nothing seems to help.
On June 2, President Joe Biden announced a frantic plan to reverse what already seemed to be an awful, exponential slide: At the peak of the country’s vaccine rollout in mid-April, almost 3.5 million doses were being put into arms every single day, but that number had quickly dropped by half, and then by half again.
Biden’s “month of action” came and went, and nothing really changed;