After chugging along, all the way to the end of June, the U.S. vaccination effort has slowed considerably in recent days. Just 437,000 shots were administered Wednesday, 694,000 Thursday, 621,000 Friday, 599,000 Saturday, and 586,000 shots were administered yesterday. As recently as July 1, the country administered more than a million shots in a day.
Late last week, White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeffrey Zients said, “we know that most people who are not yet vaccinated still have to make up their mind. As such, each person in this phase will take longer to reach, but that makes them no less important.”
If someone is still deciding on whether to get vaccinated, it means they haven’t been convinced, not merely by the CDC or any government health officials, but also by their doctor, their pharmacist, and a healthy chunk of their friends and neighbors. More than 159 million Americans are fully vaccinated, more than 184 million Americans have at least one shot. Nobody’s growing a third eyeball. No one has keeled over dead because they’ve had an allergic reaction to Bill Gates’ microchip.
After more than 622,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19, it is hard to believe that many Americans out there aren’t aware of the risks of the virus. And it is hard to believe that many Americans out there aren’t aware of the safety of the vaccines. Some folks collect every report that goes into the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — not verified to be connected to the vaccination, mind you — and cite it as evidence that the vaccines are toxic poisons. These are often the same people who insisted that the virus itself wasn’t that dangerous. When someone is convinced that the vaccine is dangerous, but the virus is not, we end up with a lot of people dying from the virus because of their calculations. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky stated that preliminary data from several states over the last few months suggests that 99.5 percent of deaths from COVID-19 in the United States were in unvaccinated people. But people convinced that the virus is not dangerous, but the vaccines are, will insist that statistic is a lie, too.
We’ve seen the public service announcements, the lotteries, the giveaways. The vaccine is now available at just about every pharmacy. It’s free. One of the greatest logistical efforts in human history brought the vaccine to every community in the U.S..
Despite all this, some people remain unwilling to get the shot, and some just don’t feel any particular urgency in getting one. (The New York Times blames certain Fox News hosts.)
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. You can make the vaccine available to people anywhere and everywhere, but you cannot make them let themselves be injected with it. As much as we want to protect ourselves from this virus, I think we all recognize the uncomfortable implications and consequences of vaccinating American citizens against their will. No matter how strongly you feel refusing the vaccine represents the wrong choice, people have to be free to make the wrong choice.