Let's vaccinate the willing

I sometimes think U.S. media forgets that there's a whole world out there that isn't the U.S.

We're drowning in stories about the unvaccinated all over the country contracting CoViD-19, especially the Delta variant. Many stories are framed as cautionary tales aimed at convincing the vaccine-hesitant to get vaccinated.

It's a worthy cause, in the abstract. It's even a practically useful one, inasmuch as the more unvaccinated hosts there are, the greater the likelihood that (a) breakthrough cases will occur, and, more troublingly, (b) a variant will evolve that is more successful at infecting vaccinated people, diminishing or negating the effectiveness of existing vaccines.

However, this is a worldwide pandemic, and with global travel slowly resuming, dangerous variants can arise anywhere and spread everywhere. While the proportion of vaccinated people in some parts of the U.S. is a lot lower than it ought to be, the proportion of vaccinated people in other parts of the world is even lower.

I fully support getting more, and more accurate, information to those who are genuinely uninformed about CoViD-19 and the vaccines against it. I fully support doing whatever's needed to work around whatever practical obstacles keep people from getting the shot(s), like the inability to take time off work or to get to vaccination sites because of a lack of transportation.

Yet at the same time we have to stop fantasizing that hardcore denialists, like those who think Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. makes sense, will ever get vaccinated. Efforts to reach out to them are a gigantic waste when there are literally billions of people around the world who would be thrilled to be vaccinated.

Right now, we have to prioritize getting the vaccines into the arms of willing recipients, because that will give us the best bang for our buck. Most of those willing recipients live in less affluent countries.

Yes, that means giving up, for the time being, on the idea of herd immunity in the U.S. Guess what? We have to do that anyway! Between the delusions of the ex-domestic Dear Leader, the fanatical irrationality of the existing anti-vaccine crowd, and the readiness of far-right media (traditional and social) to pander to both, we face a brick wall of reality-denial in something like a quarter of the U.S. population.

We have to stop wasting time beating on that brick wall, and redirect our energies to drying up the global supply of unvaccinated people to the fullest extent possible.

Once we've reached the billions of willing vaccine recipients, then we'll be in a position to tackle the truly hardheaded.