Remember about a month ago, which in the pandemic fever-dream seems like a year ago? Most states were in their 1A vaccination groups, which included medical personnel, emergency responders, and old people living in care homes.
People were trying to game the system to get those shots. Vaccine tourists were heading for Florida. Anything goes there and they would jab anybody who showed up, especially if they were wealthy donors to the Republican party. Vaccine chasers were going to low income areas trying to snag shots intended for underserved communities. People were dressing up as old people to cut in line.
What a difference a month makes. Last night President Biden announced that we're way ahead of schedule on his vaccination plan, with 100 million jabs expected in 60 days instead of 100.
Here is a national version of the vaccine accelerator I've been doing weekly for Arizona:
I produced this using data from the
CDC dashboard. I took the daily vaccination numbers, made them cumulative, converted them to a percent of the U.S. population, converted those to change from the previous day, and computed the 7-day average shown here.
The trendline is up, meaning that each day (on average) we are vaccinating a greater additional percentage of the population than the day before. We are accelerating.
This is a good thing, but it brings its own set of problems. These are good problems to have, but problems nonetheless.
One of the problems is
spoilage. Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are finicky about storage conditions, and once a vial is opened a clock starts ticking toward a limit for when the contents must be used or discarded. With more vaccinations there are more chances for things to go wrong with timing, so vaccine winds up getting spoiled.
Another problem is abundance itself. Soon shots will no longer be scarce—something that could happen
as soon as next month. Then the problem will not be fending off line jumpers, but rather finding enough arms to take available jabs.
Accordingly, public health campaigns are ramping up to promote vaccinations. Four of five former presidents have teamed up for a
series of ads to encourage vaccinations. (Guess which former president is not participating because he's a fake leader.)
There is also an effort to promote vaccinations in the black community.
Community immunity is a literacy program delivered via animated rap videos. It's produced by
Hip Hip Health and it targets education about the vaccine and suspicion in the black community that the medical system does not have its best interests at heart.
Here's hoping that these efforts succeed. It sure would be nice to see those Independence Day parties Biden talked about in his speech last night.
Image by Angelo Esslinger from Pixabay
