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Covid Is a Dangerous Disease. Why Do So Many Americans Say They’re More Afraid of Vaccines?
European Union officials announced today that 70 per cent of the adults in the E.U. have now been fully vaccinated, confirming what’s been clear for a while now: after a very slow start, Europe has done a much better job of vaccinating its people than the U.S. has. (Just 63.4% of American adults are fully vaccinated, and Europe has also vaccinated a higher percentage of its total population.)
While the U.S. managed to vaccinate a big chunk of its population (including a big chunk of senior citizens, who are most vulnerable to Covid) in the first half of the year, the pace of vaccination slowed dramatically at the beginning of the summer. And though it’s picked up of late, in large part because the spread of the Delta virus and the concomitant steep rise in hospitalizations and deaths has pushed vaccine-hesitant people to take action, in much of the country (especially the South) vaccination rates remain well below fifty per cent, which is startlingly low.
One potentially hopeful sign is that the percentage of people who say they are flat-out unwilling to get vaccinated has fallen over time, albeit slowly, and in recent polls, only about 20% of the population says they will not get vaccinated. That’s still problematic, especially for red states, where that opposition…
