If we mandated vaccines, we wouldn’t be going back to masks now. We can mandate masks, but not vaccines? Oh wait, we can mandate them... companies and government agencies are starting to. I guess they thought that Americans would get the vaccine as soon as it was available. They vastly underestimated the stupidity of the American people.
Perhaps not so much stupidity, but self-centric application of the most optimistic view of "American exceptionalism".
The problem with being exceptionally optimistic about not getting covid seems not so much ignorance of a constantly moving train of related data, but rather that one may have decided (early on, and "once and for al, l") that those facts and stats are irrelevant to one's own personal situation.
OK, "irrelevant" -- but when? Maybe someone decided "hey, I'm good" way back in February of 2020. Now we're in July of 2021 and it's the delta variant making its rounds, amid a population that's partly vaccinated, partly not vaccinated, partly unaware that vaccination itself is not 100% effective against mere infection, yet many of us still very likely figuring "hey I'm good" no matter where we fall along that spectrum.
Fox News finally coming around to deciding they were at some not fully known risk to their profit margins, for continuing to discount covid and vaccination issues, was a step in the right direction.
But if Biden's government has an active faith-based outreach group (which they likely do), I'd expect right about now they'd be working with evangelical leaders trying to get the latter to exercise their persuasive abilities in favor of their parishioners and other followers getting vaccinated.
Those high profile "leaders" who used to pray over Trump in photo ops all the while can't be ignorant of the fact that religious assemblies are fat targets for superspreader covid events. The way to keep the church doors open during a spike due to any covid variant (and "delta" won't be the last one to cause a flare-up) is to get more people vaccinated AND wearing masks. And that's also probably a way to help some meanwhile "stuck" Trump fans move away from a strictly politicized view of this illness and the various means we have of minimizing its impact.
Covid's not going away. We all have to learn how to help keep its variants at bay while research continues on better ways to interfere with its life cycle. If we can just move off that blasted dime of "I'm not giving up my freedom" as soon as anyone even mentions the advantages of vaccines and masking.... If conservative media outlets and conservative religious organizations joined in favoring covid vaccination and masking where appropriate, we'd probably make more headway against the rise of another successful variant of this coronavirus.
