Thread by @studentactivism

I see a lot of people say "if you haven't been vaccinated by now, you can't be convinced," but the numbers don't bear that out at all. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are getting their first shot EVERY DAY right now.

A quarter of a million Americans got their first Covid vaccine shot yesterday, and those numbers are consistent with where the stats have been since last summer.

In the first week of December, as the omicron surge hit, something like 4 million Americans got their first shot. But even in the pre-omicron lull, we were averaging well over a million new vaccinatees a week.

Some of these are people who didn't get around to it, or didn't have access. Some are changing their minds. Some are bowing to pressure of one kind or another. But whatever the reason, hundreds of thousands of people are walking into clinics to get the shot. Every single day.

I mean, just look at this chart, and show me the moment when we ran out of willing people to vaccinate. Find it for me.

It's easy to imagine that everyone who hasn't been vaccinated yet is unreachable, and tempting to advocate for public policy based on that premise. But it's just not true. It's not remotely true.

Public policy should be based around continuing to encourage vaccination, and around doing what we can to suppress transmission. Because every day an unvaxxed person goes without getting Covid is another day in which they might wind up getting the shot.

Above chart taken from here:
ig.ft.com/coronavirus-va…

Note: As a couple of people have noticed, the chart higher in the thread is of total doses, not first shots. But as you can see here, the two curves are extremely similar.

Some interesting questions overnight about the data, and about possible sources for the continuing vaccinations. Quick addendum to the thread...

First, several people asked if the new vaxxes might be due to vaccine tourists, but the numbers are all wrong for that to be anything but a small fraction of the total.

I haven't found anything like hard numbers for vaccine tourism specifically, but something like 2 million people a month came to the US in the second half of 2021—for any reason—and something like a million shots a DAY were administered here.

And of course for the last few months you haven't been able to fly into the US as a non-resident unless you're vaccinated, so whatever the number of vaccine tourists was in the late summer and early fall, it's gonna be lower now. cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…

Several other people asked about the expansion of eligibility for the vaccine to 5-11-year-olds in late December, and those numbers are likely a bit more significant.

According to the AAP, 5-11-year-olds got vaxxed at a rate of a little less than 5 million shots a month in their first three months of eligibility. That's a lot, but still a small minority of Covid shots administered during that time.

aap.org/en/pages/2019-….

Eyeballing this chart, it appears that daily Covid shots in the US have been averaging something like 1.4 million a day since the start of November, which would mean that under-12s would make up about 10% of the total. ig.ft.com/coronavirus-va…

And if you look at people aging into eligibility—a third category folks have asked about—that's going to be a bit more than 10K a day, and not all of them are going to get vaccinated. So not nothing, but not enough to have a dramatic effect on the flow of shots into arms.

If you sort out all the vaccine tourists and the newly eligible, you're left with somewhere between 80% and 90% of the total of new vaccinations, by my reckoning.

That 80–90% represents hundreds of thousands of people a day who could have gotten vaxxed earlier, but didn't, and are doing it now.

Some of that is the result of coercive pressure, some is outreach, some is people changing their minds. (Lots of people are in my mentions claiming it's all one thing or all another. They're wrong.)

But whatever the cause—and again, the causes are multiple and complex—the numbers are clear. New vaccination hasn't stalled out in the US, and in fact in the face of omicron, it's picked up. A lot.

That's good news, and important news, and—among other things—yet another reason to distrust the "everyone's going to get it eventually, so might as well stop trying to mitigate" crowd. An unvaxxed covid patient today could well be a vaxxed, and much milder, case next month.

(This tweet should have read "late October," not "late December.")

https://twitter.com/studentactivism/status/1487075878903455755