wader
Well-Known Angler
COVID boosters are the secret to getting back to normal. Why are Americans so resistant to them?
Why is America so bad at boosters? Its booster effort has been hampered by regulatory disagreement, confusing public health messaging and the spread of misinformation, not to mention two new waves of the virus since the fall, when the booster effort was just beginning.
WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, Denmark lifted all of its remaining coronavirus restrictions — a moment that millions of Americans have been longing for, especially as the Omicron wave that began in December appears to be subsiding.
Recent polling indicates that pandemic fatigue is rising among ordinary Americans, a trend that elected officials have noticed. “We need to move away from the pandemic,” Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas said on Monday, after he and other governors met with President Biden.
Denmark is an enticing vision of what could be. So is the U.K., where coronavirus safety measures were dispensed with in mid-January. But neither the president nor his top public health officials have been eager to signal an end to the emergency phase of the pandemic by lifting any remaining federal restrictions or softening safety recommendations (such as in-school masking).
The reason is simple, the challenge intractable: The fast-moving Omicron variant is still causing more than 2,500 U.S. deaths a day — and not nearly enough vulnerable Americans have received their booster shots to prevent the next serious variant from taking a similarly tragic toll.
The reason is simple, the challenge intractable: The fast-moving Omicron variant is still causing more than 2,500 U.S. deaths a day — and not nearly enough vulnerable Americans have received their booster shots to prevent the next serious variant from taking a similarly tragic toll.
So far, despite an endless supply of shots and months of easy access, barely a quarter of the U.S. population (27 percent) has received a booster — less than half the Danish (61 percent) or British (55 percent) rate.
Even among Americans who’ve already received their initial vaccine doses and are eligible for another, nearly 50 percent have yet to get a booster, which offers much greater protection against serious or critical COVID-19 illness than what continues to count for full vaccination (two doses of the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer or Moderna, or a single Johnson & Johnson shot).
A new CDC study of the Omicron surge in Los Angeles found that while vaccinated people were 5.3 times less likely to end up in the hospital than the unvaccinated, boosted people were 23 times less likely to do so, meaning that boosters afforded four times more protection against hospitalization than a first-series vaccination alone.
