We’re tired. There are other things in the news: police killings, mass shootings, and gun legislation grab the headlines. President Biden’s big speech before a limited congressional audience made a big nod toward the successful vaccination surge and declining rates of infection the United States—and then moved on to education, jobs, infrastructure, and health and child care in general. Covid might have been the opener on his laundry list, but it was not the closer.
On the other hand, second page and sub-headline news says that infection rates remain high or are going up in Michigan and Oregon, and spiking up in India. And in the stories we read that the world—including the US—is trying to help in India with oxygen, ventilators, some vaccine and the wherewithal to produce more vaccine in country. Those second pages also tell us that Covid variants are proliferating where contagion is spreading—they get named after countries like Brazil. We also learn that we really don’t know yet about the effectiveness of existing vaccines against all variants, and, importantly, we do not know about a need for boosters this fall or next year.
Still—at the bottom of the New York Times opinion page this morning is an article by English historian David Motedel. He writes that “Opposition to vaccination is as old as vaccination itself. And despite consistent and often widespread hostility, vaccination campaigns have always, eventually, succeeded.”
Campaigns against polio vaccination, measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations, and smallpox vaccinations were all vigorous. MMR vaccine avoidance is credited with bringing measles back in many places, including Oregon. Polio vaccine has been blamed for causing sterility and being linked to AIDs, and polio, while gone almost world-wide, reared up recently in Pakistan. The smallpox vaccine has weathered it all, and at this point the disease is officially gone.
Motedel’s words are comforting, although the struggles to get to a point where any infectious disease has trouble finding enough unvaccinated to move significantly have never been over in a day. The Covid story—and the journey—continues.
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