The AP strokes its chin...
A steady crowd of people flowed into the New England Patriots’ stadium for their second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine this week in Massachusetts, which is nearing its goal of vaccinating more than 4 million and plans to close its biggest clinics in little more than a month.
In the Deep South, meanwhile, one of the largest clinics in Alabama shut down Wednesday and others will follow in the coming weeks because demand for the shot has plunged.
“They didn’t have long enough to test it,” said James Martin, 68, explaining why he has no plans to get the vaccine as he stopped for cigarettes at a convenience store in Clanton, Alabama. “They don’t know what the long-term effect is. That’s what makes me skeptical.”
A month after every adult in the U.S. became eligible for the vaccine, a distinct geographic pattern has emerged: The highest vaccination rates are concentrated in the Northeast, while the lowest ones are mostly in the South.
GEE, WHAT COULD BE GOING ON HERE?
IT’S A REAL MYSTERY. WE MAY NEVER FIGURE IT OUT.
IT’S ALMOST AS IF THERE’S A PATTERN.
I CAN’T QUITE PUT MY FINGER ON IT…
WHO KNOWS? IT COULD BE ALMOST ANYTHING.
(sigh) OK, yes, there are certainly other factors as well:
- Lack of time off of work
- Lack of transportation (those free Uber/Lyft rides should help)
- Education level, median income level, population density, racial inequities, etc etc.
However, if your’e looking for a single, overarching significant pattern, it seems pretty obvious...
As an aside, here’s what the county-level graph looks like when the dots are sized according to population:
UPDATE: Several people in the comments think I’m being “disrespectful” or “too dismissive” of the other factors which I list above, such as racial inequities, lack of transportation, inability to get time off of work and so forth.
Again, yes, I’m sure all of those are important factors as well, but when 43% of Republicans CONTINUE TO INSIST THEY WILL NOT GET VACCINATED—a figure which has remained virtually unchanged for the past SIX MONTHS, I might add, regardless of how much availability and eligibility has increased since then, it gets awfully difficult to continue to ignore the elephant in the room.
As for the more understandable mistrust/hesitancy among Black Americans due to the Tuskegee Experiment and so forth, that’s still a real issue, but it appears to have mostly disappeared now that nearly 50% of the entire U.S. population has received at least one dose:
There are still millions of Americans who want to get vaccinated but who are having trouble doing so for legitimate reasons. There are also several million who can’t take the vaccine because they’re immunocompromised or have allergic reactions to them, and I am in no way mocking any of those folks.
But there are plenty of others who can (and have) written diaries about those issues. THIS diary is purely about the single largest group of people who could get vaccinated, but are choosing not to, without having a rational reason for it.
UPDATE: Changed the headline to “correlations” instead of “reasons” and “single, overarching” to “significant” in the body at the request of several folks for more precise terminology.
Also, at the state level, R2 is now up to 0.6588...
...and for those who’ve mentioned the racial angle, I’ve also compared vaccination percentages against the percent of the total state population which is Black. R2 is only 0.0372. Make of that what you will.
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