A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Aug 6, 2021

LA, San Fran Consider Mandatory Vax For Indoor Dining, Gyms: Pentagon For Troops

As the dangers of the Delta variant become more apparent, a growing number of organizations, companies and government entities are imposing mandatory vaccination requirements. 

This combined with rising awareness of Delta's threat appears to also be driving up vaccination rates across the US after a long period in which they were stalled. JL 

Eric Lutz reports in VanityFair:

New York City is imposing a vaccination requirement for activities. (Los Angeles and San Francisco are exploring it.). Momentum has continued to grow for mandates, with the Pentagon expected to announce a vaccine requirement for troops and the administration planning to impose one on foreign travelers. The Delta variant can galvanize the country to redouble its efforts to quash the pandemic. “This may be a tipping point for those who have been hesitant." The National Institutes of Health noted a 56% increase in vaccinations across the country over the past two weeks. “That’s what desperately needs to happen." It may be hard to remember this, but there was a time—only a few months ago—when the biggest vaccine problem in the United States was that too many people wanted it. Americans cut lines to get inoculated. They obsessively refreshed the Walgreens website in hopes of scoring precious appointments for themselves and their families. They made tentative plans for a summer that would feel more like 2019 than 2020. Anti-vaxxers and the vaccine-hesitant always seemed a threat to complicate the country’s fragile progress. But for months, the shots were in high demand, the Biden administration was meeting it, and COVID numbers were plummeting. 
Now, this: Demand for the vaccines has fallen off sharply. Incentive programs, including million-dollar lotteries, don’t seem to be working. And a more recent uptick in inoculations, while encouraging, also reflects a grim state of affairs in the U.S.: Caseloads are once again surging in what officials are calling a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” a mounting crisis currently imperiling hold-outs and vulnerable populations but that could lead to even more dangerous variants that threaten even healthy, vaccinated people. “When you give it ample opportunity to mutate,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday on Good Morning America, “you may sooner or later get another variant, and it is possible that that variant might be in some respects worse than the already very difficult variant we’re dealing with now.” 
This isn’t to indulge in catastrophic thinking—the vaccines still work; some of the media coverage of breakthrough cases has been seriously flawed; and with 70 percent of American adults now at least partially inoculated, hospitalizations and deaths in much of the country are not what they were in 2020. But, as President Joe Biden and public health officials have emphasized in recent weeks, the spiking cases and the more infectious Delta variant have dramatically raised the stakes for getting more Americans vaccinated. “The best line of defense against...the virus is the vaccine,” Biden said in an address at the White House on Tuesday. “It’s as simple as that.” 
Where the outreach to vaccine hold-outs has so far mostly consisted of education campaigns, shot-and-a-beer incentives, and efforts to help make the shots more accessible, the government and other institutions and businesses are increasingly taking a more aggressive approach. New York City is imposing a vaccination requirement for activities like indoor dining, a move Biden on Wednesday said he hoped more entities and locales would adopt. (Los Angeles and San Francisco are exploring it.). Momentum has continued to grow for mandates, with the Pentagon expected to announce a vaccine requirement for troops and the administration planning to impose one on foreign travelers as it eases pandemic travel restrictions. And while the White House has not given any indication it will implement a vaccine requirement for all air travelers—a bold move that former Obama administration official Juliette Kayyem wrote in the Atlantic could limit the spread of COVID in the U.S. and turn up the pressure on unvaccinated Americans to get their shots—a growing number of businesses and governments are now mandating them. 
That momentum is encouraging. While Republicans like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose state makes up a significant chunk of new COVID infections, will continue to take performative stands against such moves, they could go a long way toward closing the current vaccination gap: The more burdensome it becomes to move through life unvaccinated, the more incentivized Americans may be to finally get their shots. The more Americans get their shots, the less opportunity coronavirus has to spread and mutate, allowing the country to safely shed pandemic restrictions rather than reinstate them, as many governments have done.

But while the mandates that have been enacted or proposed are welcome progress, there have been some steps backward of late, as well. Americans are split on vaccine requirements, and several states have banned such mandates. And though fear of the Delta variant has led to a recent rise in vaccinations, a poll Wednesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that most of those who have yet to get jabbed say they are more fearful of the vaccines than of COVID-19—a worrisome misperception that is perhaps being fed by conservative media figures like Sean Hannity, who recently drew praise for urging his Fox News audience to “take COVID seriously,” has returned to lending his massive radio platform to anti-vax conspiracy theorists. “The vaccine has lost its efficiency as far as protection,” one guest said on Hannity’s primetime program Tuesday.

That’s simply not true, and while Hannity didn’t necessarily endorse it—“I want to give [my audience] the best information I can, which is why I invite experts like you on and even people, doctors that I don’t agree with,” he said—amplifying such disinformation helps it to take root, contributing, perhaps, to the partisan divide in vaccination rates. That was always unacceptable, but it is especially so now, at a precarious point when America’s progress against the virus has been imperiled by the Delta strain and the emergence of other worrisome mutations. Indeed, the country is at a crossroads: The more infectious Delta variant could set the U.S. back, or it can galvanize the country to redouble its efforts to quash the pandemic. “This may be a tipping point for those who have been hesitant to say, ‘OK, it’s time,” Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, noting a 56% increase in vaccinations across the country over the past two weeks. “I hope that’s what’s happening. That’s what desperately needs to happen if we’re going to get this Delta variant put back in its place.”

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