With more and more vaccines, as spring turns into summer, there will be less and less justification for the pandemic restrictions in Americans’ daily life.
It’s a great headline to see: “Biden Expects U.S. to Have Covid-19 Vaccines for All Adults by End of May.”
But I hope the Biden administration realizes what it is getting into with this announcement. First, while Biden added that having a sufficient supply by the end of May isn’t necessary a declaration that everyone will be vaccinated by the end of May . . . people will now reasonably conclude that almost everyone they know, or at least a large majority of everyone they know, will be vaccinated by the end of May. That’s not a guarantee. We’re eleven weeks into vaccinations, and Washington, D.C., has given less than 6 percent of its residents both doses. Utah and Iowa are at 6 percent, Alabama’s at 6.7 percent, and Texas and Illinois are at 6.8 percent. Meanwhile, Alaska is at 14 percent each, New Mexico and West Virginia are at 12 percent, and South Dakota’s at 11 percent. Ed Morrissey observed that the pharmacy vaccination program in Minnesota has had almost no new appointment slots for the past three weeks. This isn’t just unavoidable delays from bad weather; some states and localities are just doing a really lousy job of getting shots into arms.
If the straggling states haven’t made dramatic progress by May, no one will care about what the Biden team claims it inherited, or how many doses the administration claims to have secured.
If the Biden team lives up to its promises, the pandemic should be effectively over by summer. There are 89 days between now and May 31. Our current average is 1.9 million doses per day, and that’s without any of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccines. If we just maintain the current pace, we will have 169 million more needles jabbed into arms between now and Memorial Day. Right now, about 26.2 million people have received both shots, and 51 million Americans have received at least one shot.
Those 169 million shots would mean the 24.8 million one-shot Americans would get their second shot, as well as getting both shots into another 72 million currently unvaccinated people. Now throw on top whatever boost we get from those Johnson & Johnson shots; the company says it’s aiming to produce 94 million doses by May.
There are roughly 209 million adult Americans. We should be pretty close to herd immunity by the start of summer, and keep in mind that herd immunity isn’t really binary — as we get more people vaccinated, the virus will have fewer bodies to infect, and we will see cases drop steadily.
This means that, as spring turns into summer, there will be less and less justification for the pandemic restrictions in Americans’ daily life.
By the end of May, a lot of school districts have ended their school years but not all of them; if every adult in a school has access to a vaccine, there’s no good reason to keep schools closed at all. If everyone has access to a vaccine, there’s no good reason to keep businesses closed or restrict them to below their normal capacity. There’s no good reason to bar large gatherings, attendance at religious services, concerts, and sports events.
And by summer, when not being vaccinated becomes a personal choice, as opposed to situation forced by a lack of access to the vaccine, those of us who do get vaccinated are not obligated to lift a single finger to protect those who choose to not get vaccinated. We’re not going to restrict large gatherings. We’re not going to agree to wear masks or make a consistent conscious effort to remain six feet away from everyone outside our household. If you choose not to get the vaccine that millions of your fellow citizens are getting, that’s on you, and you have to live with the consequences of that decision.*
I suspect that as we see moves to open up society, like the one made by Texas governor Greg Abbott yesterday, you’ll hear more opposition, warning about variants. (The vaccines appear to give some protection against the new variants, but aren’t as effective against them as it is against “classic” SARS-CoV-2.) But there will always be the possibility of new variants that are more contagious, more virulent, or both. Declaring, “We can’t allow people to go back to normal life because of the risk of new variants” is effectively declaring that we can never go back to normal life.
*The one exception is people who are allergic to the ingredients in the vaccine.