As we delve further into the holiday season and Americans cannot help but want to spend time together, we currently await a surge of COVID cases to be reported. Dr. Fauci explains how holiday travel will inevitably result in a surge as travel rates reportedly reached the highest since this March with almost 1.1 million travelers passing through airport security. The traveling occurred despite last week’s recommendation from the CDC against holiday gatherings this year. These small gatherings, they explained, could potentially become super spreader events. Despite these disconcerting predictions, Biden appears to be building up his COVID strategy plan. It looks like he will not adopt Trump’s state-by-state tactic and instead plans on implementing a national strategy removing the responsibility from state leaders. It appears like he also plans on implementing a vaccination strategy. Several vaccines appear to be progressing with 55 vaccines undergoing clinical trials in humans and 87 preclinical vaccines in animals. But like everything involving the pandemic – this is not so simple. Even if the vaccines were perfectly ready to be administered next week, it is not indicative of people that will actually accept to receive the vaccine. Pre-pandemic the anti-vaccine movement was already steadily on the rise. Now, an entire movement against COVID vaccines is rising. WaPo reports Alabama and other poor rural states will be the most challenging states to administer the vaccine. In short, I hope Biden’s plan will somehow encourage Trump’s conspiracists to protect themselves. But looking at the amount of traveling and holiday converging, I may have better luck writing Santa a letter to create a Christmas miracle.
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Victoria,
I sure hope that it doesn’t require a “Christmas miracle” for people to realize that getting the vaccine is the only hope they have of protecting themselves and their loved ones from this deadly virus! I’m not sure that the incoming Biden administration actually plans to take away responsibility from the states, as you indicate, but it definitely will exert national leadership that the current president simply refused to do. Biden also has said that he will ask every American to wear a mask (whether the Trump followers will agree to do so remains to be seen, however).
To achieve “herd immunity,” it’s estimated that at least 75% of all those living in the US must get the vaccine. This is a much higher number than the highest total of those who have gotten the flu vaccine (somewhere in the mid-50% range). So there is a lot of work to be done to convince people that this is the ONLY way to end the pandemic.
–Professor Wallerstein