As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
Vaccine hesitancy/ resistance is... a problem:
Plummeting vaccination rates have turned what officials hoped would be the “last mile” of the coronavirus
immunization campaign into a marathon, threatening President Biden’s
goal of getting shots to at least 70 percent of adults by July 4.
The United States is averaging fewer than 1 million shots per day,
a decline of more than two-thirds from the peak of 3.4 million in
April, according to The Washington Post’s seven-day analysis, even
though all adults and children over age 12 are now eligible. [snip]
The
slowdown is national — with every state down at least two-thirds from
its peak — and particularly felt across the South and Midwest. Twelve
states, including Utah, Oklahoma, Montana, the Dakotas and West
Virginia, have seen vaccinations fall below 15 daily shots per 10,000
residents; Alabama had just four people per 10,000 residents get vaccinated last week.
But the picture varies considerably across the country: Thirteen mostly East and West Coast states
have already vaccinated 70 percent of adult residents, and another 15
states, plus the District of Columbia, are over 60 percent and will
likely reach Biden’s goal.
The
rest are lagging behind. Tennessee and five other states are at 50
percent or below and vaccinating at such low rates that meeting the
president’s threshold is very unlikely.
The steep decline began in mid-April,
coinciding with federal officials’ temporary suspension of the Johnson
& Johnson vaccine while they probed rare blood-clotting reactions.
That slowdown has continued, with only 2.4 million adults getting their
first shot last week. Officials must get a first dose to 4.2 million
adults per week to meet Biden’s goal of ensuring that 70 percent of
adults are at least partially vaccinated by Independence Day. (our emphasis)
There's not much doubt for us that the suspension of the J&J vaccine just as vaccination rates were climbing and confidence in vaccinations was building was a major error, an overreaction to an extremely rare reaction that gave vaccine- hesitant people a reason not to get their shot, or at least indefinitely delay the decision.
The problem is particularly critical in vulnerable populations:
Less than a quarter of Black Americans had received their first Covid-19
shot as of June 3, amid a weekslong stagnation that has defied the
government’s ramped-up effort to accelerate vaccinations and reach the
nation’s most vulnerable communities.
The slowdown has put Black Americans behind the pace set over the past
month by other racial and ethnic groups tracked by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. The trend line worries health officials
and experts who say the immunization drive is running into a
particularly complex web of distrust, outreach challenges and stubborn
barriers to access. [snip]
“We still have some places where the past history of bias,
discrimination and hate has just caused such an ingrained mistrust of
political and social structures that it’s hard to break through that,”
said James Hildreth, CEO of Meharry Medical College and a task force
member. “We need to make a stronger effort to bring the vaccine to the
communities, rather than relying on the communities to come to
vaccination centers.”
Joel Mathis posits that the Republicans just might be engaging in one of the biggest self- owns in American political history:
...[I]n so openly working to tilt
the playing field in their favor, Republicans may already be convincing
American voters the party can't win the White House without a little
funny business. In that case, the party will have created a crisis of
legitimacy for itself when it next takes power. That would be a massive
self-own — darkly amusing, if the possible consequences weren't so
serious.
Legitimacy matters. All governments depend
on some mix of coercion (laws, prisons, taxes, police) and public
acceptance of a regime's right to rule. When you have more of the
latter, you often need less of the former. And when government's
legitimacy falters, unrest can often follow — witness last summer's
Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd. The
balance is a living thing, always in flux.
In
a democracy, nothing undermines legitimacy faster than the public's
sense that its leaders didn't follow the rules while acquiring power.
Indeed, Trump has already created both an outright insurrection and an
ongoing crisis for President Biden by convincing so many of his
followers — falsely, egregiously — that Democrats stole the 2020
presidential election. The shocking revelation of the Trump Era is that
it takes only one particularly bold liar to threaten the underpinnings
of a government that couldn't even be undone by the horrors of the Civil
War.
As Mathis notes, it's no comfort that the (horrible) prospect of a future Republican governance would have called upon itself the illegitimacy it perennially seeks to pin on Democratic administrations. The instability ushered in by such a scenario is not something to be wished for.
In the meantime, Perry Bacon says there are six things that "small d democrats" need to do to turn the tide on the Republican assault on our democracy:
Having a functioning democracy isn’t just about electoral rules. But core democratic principles include
every citizen having an equal, unhindered right to vote, elections
being administered freely and fairly, and political parties respecting
the outcomes of those elections. We often think of democracy as binary —
a political system is either democratic or it isn’t — but scholars view democracy as a continuum. And right now, as Republicans keep undermining our election system, America is becoming less democratic.
That’s an existential crisis, and it should be treated like one. At least six things are needed to turn the tide. [snip]
I know some of these six are unrealistic. But I think we need all six to
happen, because the problem we face is so big: Top officials in one of
our two political parties, and perhaps a majority of its voters, are
embracing undemocratic steps to preserve their power. America needs a
huge coalition of small-d democrats — Democratic, Republican and
independent — to come together to stop this anti-democratic drift.
We left out the six things so you'll just have to go to the link to see what he's proposing!
Finally, please do yourself a favor by heading over to Infidel 753's link round-up for the best collection of links to interesting posts from around the Internet. That's all we ask.
