“I don’t know what more can be done,” said Dr. Arnold Monto, a professor of epidemiology and global health at the University of Michigan and a former adviser to the World Health Organization. “There is really no valid reason to say that these vaccines are not safe, given the fact that they’ve been used for so long, with a limited number of clear side effects… and yet people are not vaccinated.”
And viruses, Monto warned, “have a way of finding the susceptible.”
The most obvious problem regarding those most militantly resistant to vaccinations is also one effectively untouched in Biden’s speech and plan: the fact that vaccination status has become as polarized politically as cable news viewership. According to a Washington Post-ABC News survey released moments after Biden’s address, 98 percent of Democrats are either vaccinated or intend to be. Among Republicans, that number drops to only 49 percent...
As a Democratic president, public health experts said, Biden is not in the best position to reach those people—many of whom falsely think that he was installed in office illegally, and many of whom are predisposed to believe pseudoscience alleging that the vaccines are untested, unsafe, or untrustworthy.
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