Americans must get their shots.
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
The unvaccinated are not a monolith in America. They're young and old, live in suburbs and cities, and straddle income and education levels. |
But there are some notable patterns when it comes to political affiliations. Surveys suggest that Republicans are much less likely than Democrats to be vaccinated. |
But politics aside, all of the unvaccinated share a serious risk from the highly contagious Delta variant. |
At Opinion, we've been exploring the struggle to vaccinate hesitant Americans, including the failures on the right to deliver a clear, consistent message about the risks of Covid and foregoing the shot. We've looked closely at who isn't getting vaccinated and why, developed a chat bot for how to talk to unvaccinated friends and family, and considered strategies for increasing vaccinations ranging from lotteries to mandates. |
Today we are publishing an essay from Alex Azar, the former secretary of Health and Human Services under former President Donald Trump and one of the architects of Operation Warp Speed, the initiative to expedite Covid-19 vaccines. Azar calls on vaccine holdouts to reconsider and urges leaders on both sides of the aisle — but especially his fellow conservatives — to support vaccination efforts. |
As a key official overseeing Operation Warp Speed, Azar has an insider view of the process by which vaccines were developed that may be helpful to some people waffling on whether to get one. |
"Any claims that the vaccines are unsafe or ineffective, or that corners were cut are not true," he writes. |
Azar acknowledges that the Trump administration did not do enough to address hesitancy, and did not predict the extent to which conservatives would resist vaccination. The fact that many Republican politicians and conservative media downplayed the vaccines until relatively recently hasn't helped. |
"I'm glad former President Trump got vaccinated," Azar writes, "but it would have been even better for him to have done so on national television so that his supporters could see how much trust and confidence he has in what is arguably one of his greatest accomplishments." |
There are some signals of an overdue change: In recent weeks a broad range of conservative political leaders like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama and the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, have redoubled their public appeals in support of vaccination. |
There were substantial missteps and misleading remarks in the Trump administration's response to Covid-19, which has now claimed over 600,000 American lives — and while the former president has at times encouraged Americans to be vaccinated, he's far from spearheading a major effort to do so. Meanwhile, the pro-Trump conservative media has become a clearinghouse for vaccine skepticism and outright opposition. |
Operation Warp Speed was still successful in pushing forward safe and effective vaccines. As Azar argues, the virus is nonpartisan and so are the vaccines. |
It's time to embrace what is universally acknowledged to be the eventual way out: Covid-19 shots. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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