In the semi-rural area where I live we have 1/3 trumpsters who won't get it due to their political allegiances and 1/3 hippies who won't because woo woo reasons. I am assuming there will be a harsh reckoning in store for this and similar places.
The harsh reckoning will be for the urban areas who subsidize that stupidity, when variants will emerge from among these unvaccinated populations, and we are going to go through this song and dance all over again.
It's also why I'm incensed that vaccine production is ramping up both too slowly, and will top out at too low a number. It can't take six months to vaccinate the first world, and eighteen to vaccinate the developing world against a variant.
Or variants emerging from those vaccinated. It’s nonsense to assume “the unvaccinated are dirty Petri dishes where mutations come from!” Variants can come from vaccines themselves or mutating in the host and then spreading.
If anyone think that’s impossible, such a phenomenon is happening right now in Africa with Polio. Wild Polio is declared to be eradicated. A vaccine derived strain is keeping the outbreak alive.
Sure, it can happen, and viruses spread even through a vaccinated population, but quantity is a quality all of its own. Vaccinate everyone, and the number of opportunities for the virus to mutate and spread drops by orders of magnitude. Vaccinate half the population, and all that you'll do is create a great amount of evolutionary selection pressure for a mutation.
