Thanks to Republican Anti-Vaxxers, the U.S. May Never Reach COVID-19 Herd
Immunity
The huge percentage of GOP voters refusing to get vaccinated is likely to
drag out the pandemic.

As Joe Biden prepared to take office, he announced an ambitious target to
vaccinate 100 million Americans within his first 100 days. When it became
clear he was going to achieve that goal well ahead of schedule, he upped
it to 200 million, a figure his administration is on track to hit this
week. As part of that effort, on Wednesday, the president will call on
businesses to give workers paid time off to get their COVID-19 shots. On
Monday, everyone in the country over 16 became eligible for the
vaccination, and as of Wednesday, 40% of the U.S. population had received
at least one dose of a vaccine and more than 50% of adults had gotten at
least one shot, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
tally. Which is obviously fantastic news! A lot less fantastic: the fact
that a significant number of Republicans are refusing to get the vaccines
available to them, threatening to prevent the U.S. from reaching herd
immunity and a return to prepandemic life.

Axios reports that the United States is expected to run out of adults who
want to get vaccinated within the next two to four weeks, citing a recent
Kaiser Family Foundation analysis. According to the authors of the paper,
�It appears we are quite close to the tipping point where demand for
rather than supply of vaccines is our primary challenge.� Federal, state,
and local officials, and the private sector, will face the challenge of
having to figure out how to increase willingness to get vaccinated among
those still on the fence, and ideally among the one-fifth of adults who
have consistently said they would not get vaccinated or would do so only
if required.� The authors added: �Once this happens, efforts to encourage
vaccination will become much harder, presenting a challenge to reaching
the levels of herd immunity that are expected to be needed.�

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Donald Trump�s refusal to get his own shot
in public, and to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to convincing
his base of the importance of getting vaccinated, �vaccine hesitancy�
among Republicans is raging. According to a Monmouth University poll
conducted between April 8 and April 12, 43% of GOP respondents said
they�ll never get the coronavirus vaccine (versus just 5% of Democrats).
In a Quinnipiac University poll, 45% of Republicans said they �don�t plan�
on getting the shot. Overall, states that voted for Trump in 2020 are
lagging behind those that went for Biden when it comes to vaccinations.

Yet more worrisome: the fact that there appears to be little that can be
done to change the minds of people refusing to take one of the most
important steps toward ending the pandemic. Per The Washington Post:

Many vaccine-hesitant Americans are increasingly entrenched in their
decisions to resist the shots, said Frank Luntz, a longtime GOP
communications expert who convened [a] focus group over Zoom. �The further
we go into the vaccination process, the more passionate the hesitancy is,�
Luntz said after the session. �If you�ve refused to take the vaccine this
long, it�s going to be hard to switch you.� That was the case in the
weekend�s focus group, the latest in a series Luntz has convened. It
included 17 participants who heard pro-vaccine pitches from four doctors,
including three Republican politicians and Tom Frieden, director of the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Obama administration.
Unlike a similar focus group five weeks ago, when most participants told
Luntz and Frieden that the session persuaded them to get shots, attendees
Sunday said they were swayed only moderately by doctors� urging�or not
moved at all.

�I was zero [on] the vaccine. I�m still a zero,� said a woman
identified as Tammy from Virginia about an hour into Sunday�s focus group.
Her comments came after Frieden repeatedly tried to calm attendees� fears,
which included questions about the vaccines� unknown long-term effects and
about baseless claims suggesting the shots would change recipients� DNA
even though that does not happen.

Disturbingly, the focus group revealed that many people refusing to get
vaccinated would use a fake vaccination card claiming they had received
their shots. �One-thousand percent,� one woman said. �If I have a fake
vaccine card, yeah, I can go anywhere,� said one man. Other participants
said they�d use a fake vaccination card to go on trips and attend
concerts. Federal officials have warned that they will prosecute Americans
who make, sell, or use falsified cards, and noted that the use of such
documents could prolong the pandemic by letting unvaccinated people
continue to spread the highly contagious virus.

Luntz said Trump bears responsibility for the tens of millions of
hesitant GOP voters, having used his presidential podium to make political
attacks while missing opportunities to promote vaccines to his political
base. �He wants to get the credit for developing the vaccine. Then he also
gets the blame for so few of his voters taking it,� Luntz said in an
interview. The longtime GOP pollster added that President Biden could be
doing more to cross the aisle, such as making a joint appearance with
Trump to tout the vaccines before promptly deferring to medical experts.

Meanwhile, the refusal of a huge percentage of the population to get a
vaccine that could not only save their lives but the lives of other
Americans is coming at a treacherous moment. Per The Daily Beast:

India is in the throes of a devastating surge in COVID-19 cases. The
wave of infections, propelled by a new variant of the coronavirus, could
spill into the United States. Indeed, the Indian variant��lineage� is the
scientific term�is already here. With most states reopening and governors
and mayors relaxing mask mandates as pandemic fatigue sets in,
realistically just one thing can spare Americans from another spike in
cases, experts say. The country must double down on its successful
vaccination campaign. Getting tens of millions more jabs in arms in the
coming weeks could block the new lineage�s transmission pathways�and stop
it cold.

A sharp decline in uptake could leave tens of millions of people
unprotected for months or longer. That might give the new lineage space
and time to grab on. �If the Indian variant were to establish in a
landscape of lowered social measures and moderate level of population
immunity, then it will spread,� Edwin Michael, an epidemiologist at the
Center for Global Health Infectious Disease Research at the University of
South Florida, told The Daily Beast.

�We are in a perilous moment with the rise of variants and pandemic
fatigue,� warned Georgetown University global health expert Lawrence
Gostin. �What protects us from another surge is immunity,� Jeffrey
Klausner, a clinical professor of preventive medicine at USC, told The
Daily Beast.