After an all-too-brief respite, the United States is again at a crossroads in the pandemic. The number of infections has ticked up — slowly at first, then swiftly — to 51,000 cases per day, on average, more than four times the rate a month ago. The country may again see overflowing hospitals...
www.yahoo.com
The NYT is out today with this excellent article on vaccine hesitancy, and what may be waiting in the wings following Delta. I thought this was telling...
"America is one of the few countries with enough vaccines at its disposal to protect every resident — and yet it has the highest rates of vaccine hesitance or refusal of any nation except Russia." (Certainly a source of pride. DWS...)
Why vaccine hesitancy is such a problem...
"Every infected person, anywhere in the world, offers the coronavirus another opportunity to morph into a new variant. The more infections there are globally, the more likely new variants will arise.
The United States will be vulnerable to every one of them until it can immunize millions of people who now refuse to get the vaccine, are still persuadable but hesitant or have not yet gained access. The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again."
The hesitancy issue has two main players. People who are unvaccinated AND people who are themselves vaccinated (like Tucker Carlson) and yet traffic in promoting doubt and conspiracy theories to (I guess) keep others from getting vaccinated? It seems like a nearly equal mix of naked grift and political posturing...
But the Times also points out that while the risk of death to the vaccinated are highly mitigated, that continued vaccine refusal may lead to increased tensions between the vaxed and the unvaxed. It could also lead to the reinstitution of public health measures, that those opposed to the vaccine were to a large extent protesting against PRIOR to the existence of a vaccine...
So I struggle to understand what the end game is for the unvaxed. They don't want to wear masks, they don't want businesses shutdown/ lockdowns, and they don't want to participate in lifesaving measures like getting a shot. These new variants are going to continue to rampage thru the unvaxed, and hospitalizations and deaths among that group are going to continue to be a reality.
So what do they expect people in the medical profession to do? This video of a nurse in Arkansas who shares her experiences of being accused of faking covid deaths and "murdering people" demonstrates the fallacy of any claim the unvaxed just want to be left alone and die on their own. They aren't willing to follow mask rules, and they aren't content to let doctors and nurses treat the sick.
This woman Sunny speaks of nurses she knows who have quit over "compassion fatigue". They just aren't able to muster the caring for people who get sick after refusing the vax, in light of all the people they've treated who would have taken the vax in a heartbeat, but died early on before there was a miracle vax available.
I think as more and more of these cases spread and the unvaccinated remain so intransigent and refuse to take a simple shot, that this sort of "compassion fatigue" is going to set in among the vaxed population with regards to how we regard the unvaxed.
Again,I just don't get the end game for the vaccine refusers, esp those like the woman in the video whose 8 yr old son got really sick with covid and (in her own words) is still sick a lot of the time? I fear some of these folks are going to have to experience actual loss, and unfortunately that might not even be enough to fix the extremely stupid...