The blue trendline is just my eyeball guess, but I don't think it's very far off from reality. What's remarkable is the slope of the line. None of us would be surprised if red states were a little lower than blue states in vaccine acceptance, but they're way lower. Recent polling shows that among Democrats vaccine resistance has dropped to about 10%, but among Republicans it's held steady for months at about 40%.
Forty percent! And another 15% are unsure. In all, less than half of all Republicans have either gotten the vaccine or say they will.
This is a public health disaster. How do we ever get to herd immunity if a quarter of the country has already decided to never get vaccinated?
We don't. And when we don't, then the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers all yell, "See? We told you it wouldn't work!"
How do we ever get to herd immunity if a quarter of the country has already decided to never get vaccinated?
Ah, but which quarter? Since the difference is geographic, it's not a randomly distributed quarter, but the opposite: a geographically concentrated one. So what we should expect to see is not a general lack of herd immunity, but patches of immunity and vulnerability. Blue states will achieve herd immunity, while red states will wallow in sickness. And it will almost certainly occur on smaller scales as well: blue regions likely will enjoy immunity, while red regions -- and families, and social circles -- will not.
It's a human tragedy. But unlike many, it's something they will have brought on themselves, by their own consistent and deliberate actions, against loud warnings from well-informed and beneficent public servants.
You can lead a horse to water, etc...
Presumably herd immunity will be achieved eventually because most of them will have had a case of COVID.
It's likely to be more geographically concentrated than state level data would show. Plenty of deep red areas in blue states and blue areas in red states.
It's an interesting outcome that suggests Trumpism is taking on a life independent of its figurehead. Trump has not only urged Americans to get vaccinated, he has repeatedly bragged about his genius in Operation Warp Speed that made vaccines available long before the enemy media or the fool Fauci believed possible. Years before ! In other words vaccines ought to be a Trump Triumph, with cultists waving their vaccine passports proudly to Own the Libs.
But the online Trump Republican network decided it was easier, and more fun, to stick with the first Trump theme that the virus was a hoax and measures taken in response to the imaginary "pandemic" were nothing but leftist ploys to increase their control of the population. That justified them in continuing to mock masks, defy rules about social distancing and peddle the kinds of stories they love about the media covering up a massive trail of death and sickness caused by vaccinations.
Expect more of this as time goes by. Trump will eventually become nothing but a brand name for whatever lunatic ideas and white supremacist programs hatch and bloom in the fetid right-wing propaganda network.
Glenn Kessler just issued this comment Four Pinocchios. El Jefe never said COVID19 as a disease was a hoax, just that the Democrat Party was using it in the same way as Ukraine (which was a hoax, per El Jefe) to smear El Jefe.
Consider yourself WAPOwnd.
"Recent polling shows that among Democrats vaccine resistance has dropped to about 10%, but among Republicans it's held steady for months at about 40%."
40% is the new crazification factor, give or take a percentage or two.
Probably more like 60%, 40% is only those who state it publicly.
Anti-maskers logic,
if a random person appeared suddenly out of the crowd and beat him to a bloody pulp with a bat he would be perfectly fine with it because even though a mask mandate would have prevented it it's much more important that he can be beaten like that, arbitrarily and without consequence.
Society will split further. Covid-19 will soon transform into partisan leprosy. We'll do our vaccine-passport best to shun Republicans. Unclean! Unclean!
Most people in TX will wear their masks when going out. Of course there are enough jerks making the news insulting the waiters and waitresses just trying to safely do their job....
That graph is most likely an artifact of density. Rural states are both more likely to have voted for Trump and harder to organize a mass vaccination campaign for.
WV begs to differ. It’s rural af and still managed to get high vaccination rates.
Also New Mexico.
74 million Trump voters/republicans. Round up for underage families and republican non voters to 150 million. I think that's too much but whatever. Cut by 50%.
75 million non-vaxxers. That is 23% of the population (330 million). Assume a bit more for people who medically can't be vaccinated.
That's 75% immunity which is solidly in herd immunity territory.
Some of this will change as I see more and more private sector things requiring it. Buffalo Bills today for example. Also some will get sick and recover or die, decreasing the number further. Some may say no vaccine because they already got sick as so have some immunity.
Assuming vaccines are eventually approved for all ages, even with these hold outs I bet you can get 80-85% immunity. There will still be outbreaks but I see them as containable. Hell my son was born while the Somalis where having a measles party over on the other side of the hospital and measles is 5x as contagious.
So assuming you stay out of areas that are heavily republican and exeriencing an outbreak, even someone who has cancer like yourself should be alright imo.
How does one have a measles party in a hospital? Modern hospitals don’t usually allow infectious people to hang out with uninfected people for very long.
I meant that a rather large number of somali measles patients were there as an outbreak in that community was going on at the time. It wasn't one of those purposefully infectious gatherings "pox parties" and I only remembered that people do that after posting.
Also you have to figure that members of the armed forces will be required to get the vaccine once any of the plentiful versions are formally approved by the FDA, it's not yet required due to the versions being under EUA only at this point.
Agreed. A lot of "I never get to choose in the army so if I get to choose the answer is no!"
That's maybe 1.5 million people?
Maybe check for correlation of population density, though, and see which slope is higher.
Just saying, the more rural, the tougher the logistics especially with the two-shot vaccines requiring expensive refrigeration methods.
Shh, there is a narrative to be promoted...
Yes one hopes that never isn't really what they mean.
But the reports are that is easy to get vaccinated in the rural areas and hard in the cities. Basically we over-solved that expected problem and have people driving way out into rural areas to get shots.
"Recent polling shows that among Democrats vaccine resistance has dropped to about 10%, but among Republicans it's held steady for months at about 40%."
They're not saying "we can't get vaccines", they're saying "we won't get vaccines
Vaccines in arms is perhaps a proxy for vaccine resistance but how good is it? How does one separate from less-competent distribution?
For instance Rick here in Fairfax, VA we haven't open up availability to everyone over age 16 yet, that is happening on 4/18/2021, the county focused on getting folks over 65, folks with health issues and folks working occupations that cannot work from home.
So the numbers might look worse from some perspectives, but it's the sheer number of folks needing/wanting the vaccine versus the doses our county was allocated.
From the plot I assume numerical quantities are available both for presidential margin of victory and proportion of the population having had at least one dose. So why can't both a trendline and an r-value be calculated? Not that I think Kevin is that far off, but I'd really like to at least vaguely quantify degree of correlation.
I'm totally perplexed at the resistance of so many of my fellow republicans. Some of my good friends aren't getting it. I get pretty frustrated but don't go to far with it since I don't want to cause friction in our friendships. I had no qualms about getting the vax. (Got my second Pfizer dose a couple weeks ago.) That said, when disusing herd immunity, shouldn't we also include those that have already had covid and now have antibodies/immunity? I have well over a hundred friends and acquaintances that have had covid. Some of those fall into the camp of refusing to to get the vaccine.
That graph seems way at odds with everything else I see, and somewhat misleading.
The real action is all between 30 and 40%, and I suspect that these differences are just not that important. Insofar as causality goes, they probably reflect rural vs urban (things just happen slower on the rural timeframe), and I see no evidence so far that we won't all land up in the same place in a few months.
cf
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine-doses.html
Like I say over and over again: you can choose to be informed. Or you can choose to be partisan. But as soon as partisanship takes priority, people lose their goddamn minds. Even Kevin -- who's usually pretty good about this sort of thing.
https://www.theinsight.org/p/how-polarization-ate-our-brains
Vaccination rates are not really relevant to vaccine resistance until effectively everyone who wants a vaccination has had one. At that point, you can say how many people are refuseniks; prior to that all you can say is that some states appear to be more efficient than others at getting shots into arms.
Give away a free gun with every shot. It's not like it's going to make a difference in the number of guns they have - what's one more?
We allow that quarter to kill itself off. After all, that's what they promoted for the rest of us last year.
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"How do we ever get to herd immunity if a quarter of the country has already decided to never get vaccinated?"
The old-fashioned way. Think of it as evolution in action.