As I continue to make arrangements for my trip to Portugal, which is still very much up in the air due to everchanging COVID travel complications, I was discussing the trip with my daughter and I told her that I’m not sure I’ll be in any more danger there than in Montana with the surge in cases going on here. That got me to thinking about this whole vaccination controversy. If you look at the current data, only about 50% of the US population are fully vaccinated. That is about the same percentage as here in Montana. If you look at the percentage of people who are vaccinated in each of the 50 states, it forms somewhat of a normal probability distribution. There are a few states on the low end – mostly in the South, and there are a few states like Vermont that are outliers on the high end. But, for the most part, the percentage of the population fully vaccinated is normally distributed around 50%.
Think about that. That means that when you go anywhere, roughly 50% of the people around you are not vaccinated – regardless of where you live. And if you take into account the fact that no children under 12 are vaccinated, the odds are that fewer than 50% of the people around you wherever you go are vaccinated. Here in Montana, given that mask mandates are against the law, whenever I go to the grocery store, it is a pretty sure bet that at least half the people in that store are unvaccinated and almost all of those people are not wearing masks. Let that sink in.
Now the government is going to start recommending and making booster shots available due to the waning efficacy of the initial two shot regime. It is looking more and more like the COVID virus will be an endemic for which we may need an annual shot just like for the flu. Of course, less than 50% of the population normally get a flu shot annually even though somewhere between 22,000 and 61,000 people die from the flu every year. Since COVID is even more virulent and deadly than the flu we can expect even more people to die unnecessarily due to the inability of the American people to step up and do the right thing. It boggles my mind.
I don’t worry too much about the flu these days. I get my annual shot and take reasonable precautions. I really don’t worry about getting the flu when I go to the grocery store nor do I care about whether people have their flu shot or not. If the COVID virus was similar in characteristics to the flu and we could get annual shots against it, then we could probably get on with our lives. However, the Delta variant of the COVID virus is much more contagious than the flu and it is more deadly. So now, since 50% of the population refuse to do their part to try to stop the spread of this virus, I will be concerned when I go to the grocery store. I will certainly take precautions but it just seems ridiculous that 50% of the American population can put the other half of the population at risk due to their selfish and ignorant decisions.
Yesterday I talked about the collapse of Afghanistan and how there is widespread criticism of Biden’s decision to continue the withdrawal of troops that was agreed to and negotiated by Trump. Many people are talking about how we have ‘abandoned’ Afghanistan, implying that we should have stayed there to fight this unwinnable war forever. Certainly, some of the loudest critics are the Republicans.
I find this extremely ironic when we see what is going on in our own country with respect to COVID. The largest number of cases of COVID are occurring in those areas of the country where there are low vaccination rates and governors and Republican-controlled legislatures have enacted laws stripping public health officials of the power to take steps to save lives. If you want to talk about ‘abandonment’ I would argue that the Republican politicians in this country have abandoned the American people.
We are, after all, at war. The Afghans were fighting a war against the Taliban Islamists in their country. We are fighting a war against a deadly virus. And while the combatants may use different weapons and the battle strategies are different, they are both violent wars. If the Republicans are so damned vocal about Biden’s decision to ‘abandon’ the Afghans I don’t understand how they can completely overlook the abandonment of their own US citizens.
There have been less than 10,000 deaths of US troops in Afghanistan over the past 20 years. More than 630,000 Americans have died in the last two years due to COVID. In a ‘normal war’ (excuse the term because I understand there is really no such thing as a ‘normal war’) commanders would use all available resources to win that war. We have everything we need to stem the tide in this COVID war in the United States – vaccinations, wearing masks, social distancing, etc. – and yet many Republicans have chosen to not use those tools and have actively campaigned against them. If that is not ‘abandonment’ I don’t know what is.
So, the next time someone starts screaming about how Biden abandoned the Afghans, remind them that many here at home have abandoned the citizens of the US in the fight against COVID. As they say, people in glass houses …..