The other major push of late has been stoking a renewed panic about COVID. We are told that the Delta variant is some sort of super-virus that causes “breakthrough” infections in people who have already been vaccinated, and that this may require a reintroduction of mask mandates, remote schooling in the fall, and other lockdown initiatives. A lot of this message involves deliberately conflating positive tests for COVID with serious cases that require hospitalization or cause death or grave illness. The message it sends is that hope of an end to COVID-restricted life is illusory and that vaccination is futile. Neither of those things is true, nor is it helpful for the public to believe them.

At the same time, there has been a major freak-out about unvaccinated people, leading to calls for heavy-handed restrictions on the liberty of anyone who is not vaccinated yet. Vaccination rates have indeed lagged frustratingly; the problem is a real one. But some perspective is required. The people who are most vulnerable to the virus — especially senior citizens — have been vaccinated at much greater rates. And it was always going to take a long time to get up to full global herd immunity.

According to the Our World in Data vaccination tracker based on local-government reports, 163 million Americans have been fully vaccinated, more than the total in any other two countries put together. Forty-nine percent of Americans are now fully vaccinated. No major Western country is above Britain’s 56 percent. Only three countries on the entire planet — the islands of Malta and Iceland and the United Arab Emirates — have broken the two-thirds barrier. Plenty of large and/or advanced countries are way behind us — Sweden (38 percent), Finland (32 percent), Hong Kong (30 percent), Japan (25 percent), Mexico (19 percent), Australia (13 percent), Argentina (13 percent), South Korea (13 percent), New Zealand (13 percent), and India (6.8 percent). Large sections of the globe are in single digits. This is reason for concern, but it also suggests that we should have assumed all along that getting the unvaccinated population down to a negligible number was never a realistic prerequisite for reopening the country and its borders.