Vaccination Is Making America Forget a Basic Pandemic Rule - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/06/individualism-still-spoiling-pandemic-response/619133
Unvaccinated people are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster together, socially and geographically, enabling the emergence of localized COVID-19 outbreaks. Partly, these clusters exist because vaccine skepticism grows within cultural and political divides, and spreads through social networks. But they also exist because decades of systemic racism have pushed communities of color into poor neighborhoods and low-paying jobs, making it harder for them to access health care in general, and now vaccines in particular.
As Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, said on Twitter, “Don’t tell me it’s “safe”; tell me what level of death or disability you are implicitly choosing to accept.” (...) How much additive burden is a country willing to foist upon people who already carry their disproportionate share? What is America’s goal—to end the pandemic, or to suppress it to a level where it mostly plagues communities that privileged individuals can ignore?
