But there’s also a less promising scenario. The U.S. has the lowest vaccination rate among wealthy democracies, and has now fallen behind many poorer nations, such as Uruguay, Cambodia, and Mongolia. The anti-vaccine movement remains a potent force. Last Monday, protesters tore down a covid testing site in New York City. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in six adults nationwide remains adamantly opposed to vaccination; only a third of parents say that they plan to get their children inoculated immediately after the vaccine is authorized, and a quarter say that they “definitely” won’t. In the U.K., ninety-seven per cent of people over sixty-five are fully vaccinated; during the Delta wave there, daily cases reached eighty per cent of record levels, but daily deaths only eleven per cent. Just eighty-four per cent of older Americans are fully vaccinated, and cases and deaths are more tightly coupled: both recently reached around two-thirds of last winter’s levels. “Are we going to have as bad a surge this winter as last winter?” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, asked. “I think we can definitively say no. But what people don’t appreciate about Delta is that it finds pockets of unvaccinated people and just rips through them. If you’re an older person living in this country, and you’re not vaccinated, it’s going to be a very bad winter.”…

But there’s also a less promising scenario. The U.S. has the lowest vaccination rate among wealthy democracies, and has now fallen behind many poorer nations, such as Uruguay, Cambodia, and Mongolia. The anti-vaccine movement remains a potent force. Last Monday, protesters tore down a covid testing site in New York City. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in six adults nationwide remains adamantly opposed to vaccination; only a third of parents say that they plan to get their children inoculated immediately after the vaccine is authorized, and a quarter say that they “definitely” won’t. In the U.K., ninety-seven per cent of people over sixty-five are fully vaccinated; during the Delta wave there, daily cases reached eighty per cent of record levels, but daily deaths only eleven per cent. Just eighty-four per cent of older Americans are fully vaccinated, and cases and deaths are more tightly coupled: both recently reached around two-thirds of last winter’s levels. “Are we going to have as bad a surge this winter as last winter?” Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, asked. “I think we can definitively say no. But what people don’t appreciate about Delta is that it finds pockets of unvaccinated people and just rips through them. If you’re an older person living in this country, and you’re not vaccinated, it’s going to be a very bad winter.”