Dear India Currents,
I read with interest Ritu Marwah’s article, “The Ghosts of COVID: Past, Present, and Future”, dated December 18, 2021. It is indeed shameful that an affluent country like the USA, which came up with three remarkably safe and effective vaccines in less than a year, has done such a poor job of preventing and mitigating Covid. The USA population is about 4 percent of the world population and yet Covid related deaths in USA are about 17 percent of the Covid related deaths in the world.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that as of December 14, roughly 85% of adults ages 18 and over in the United States had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine but 15% remained unvaccinated, even though vaccines are free and readily available. The anti-vaxxers and the vaccine-hesitants have cited numerous reasons for opposing vaccination but none of them would cite the real reason, which I strongly suspect has something to do with politics. As of December 17, 2021, 91 percent of Democrats but only 60 percent of Republicans had received at least one shot of vaccine. And the gap in Covid’s death toll between “blue” states that vote mostly Democratic and “red” states that vote mostly Republican this fall widened more quickly than at any previous point of the pandemic. A total of 25 out of every 100,000 residents in counties that voted for Donald Trump died of Covid in October, compared with the 7.8 per 100,000 in counties that voted heavily for Biden, according to the data analysis from the Times.
I hope the electorate would remember these facts in the upcoming elections of 2022 and 2024 before they cast their vote.
Sincerely,
Pradeep Srivastava
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