Prevent Economic And Educational Shutdowns
Our path forward relies on giving schools and businesses the tools they need to prevent economic and educational shutdowns, so that our students can remain safe in school, our workers can be safe at work, and our economy can continue to grow.
At the beginning of last year, America was experiencing widespread school and business shutdowns: only 46% of K-12 schools were open for in-person learning, and millions of businesses had closed and tens of millions of Americans had lost their jobs in 2020. Throughout the last year, the Administration worked to provide schools, child care providers, and businesses with the necessary tools and resources to safely open, while keeping our children, students, and workers safe.
The Administration provided a historic investment of $130 billion from the American Rescue Plan to reopen schools by improving school ventilation, accessing tests, and hiring more teachers, nurses, and staff. To protect workers and keep our businesses open, the Administration launched the largest vaccination campaign in history working hand-in-hand with the business community and requiring vaccinations where we could, including for federal workers.
The path forward in the fight against COVID-19 is clear: schools, workers, and workplaces have resources and guidance to prevent shutdowns.
Who Are The Hard
Most of the HPS response options are either about information or trust .
However, one involves access: It’s hard for me to get a COVID-19 vaccine.
Who are the people in the small subset of adults who responded to the HPS who reported that they had not gotten a vaccine because it was hard to get?
Compared to all HPS respondents, the hard-to-reach:
- Were more likely to be non-White.
- Were less likely to be married .
- Had lower levels of education, on average, and were more economically disadvantaged about half of this hard-to-reach population reported difficulty meeting expenses in the week prior to the survey.
- Were much more likely to report a disability. The HPS asks about difficulty seeing, hearing, remembering or walking or climbing stairs. Those who reported being unvaccinated because they had no access to the vaccine were almost twice as likely to report either complete impairment or a lot of difficulty with one or more of these measures than the general population.
Launch A Nationwide Test To Treat Initiative So Americans Can Rapidly Access Treatment Including By Visiting A One
The Administration will put forth new educational efforts for the public and providers so that Americans can rapidly access treatments. The Administration will establish One-Stop Test to Treat locations at pharmacy-based clinics, community health centers, Long-Term Care Facilities, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs facilities across the country. One-stop sites will be operational by March.
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Individual Counties Are Still Vulnerable To Outbreaks
About 41% of the US population is fully vaccinated a much higher share than most of the world. But the pandemic is as much local as it is global, and largely unvaccinated communities are still vulnerable to outbreaks.
“When we say the United States has nearly 50% of people fully vaccinated now, that’s great, but that doesn’t mean anything for a particular place,” Lisa Lee, an epidemiologist at Virginia Tech, recently told Insider. “We really do need to think carefully about our own situation and our own community.”
Daily coronavirus cases in Missouri, for instance, have risen 2% in the past two weeks. In Reynolds, the state’s least vaccinated county, daily cases have quadrupled during that time. Just 14% of Reynolds residents are fully vaccinated so far.
Ideally, scientists would like to see every county vaccinate at least 75% of its population. That’s probably the threshold at which a county has reached herd immunity the point beyond which the virus can’t easily pass from person to person.
“Some places are above 60%, so there are some pockets that are pretty protected,” Lee said. “We have to understand, though, that it just takes a couple of cases, a couple of people coming into a community, to pass this along.”
The US continues to struggle with vaccine hesitancy: As of April, about 13% of US adults in a Kaiser Foundation poll said they wouldn’t seek out a shot even if it were available to them.
Who Is Eligible For A Vaccine
Everyone 6 months and older is now eligible for a coronavirus vaccine, after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for those under 5 in June.
Three coronavirus vaccines are in use across the country, including the two-dose mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna and the Johnson & Johnson one-dose vaccine, though children 6 and older are eligible for only Pfizer. Although Johnson & Johnson is still available for use, regulators have suggested that people should opt for one of the mRNA vaccines because of concerns about a rare but serious blood clotting condition among those who received the companys shot.
The vaccine rollout began in December 2020, with a focus on some of the most vulnerable populations, including health care workers, residents of long-term care facilities and people 65 and older. Although eligibility for these groups initially varied by state and county, every state had made all adults eligible for the shots by April 2021, according to a Times survey.
In May 2021, the F.D.A. extended its emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine to children 12 and older.
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The Hidden Reason Behind Low Vaccination Rates In The Us
A box of intranasal Influenza A 2009 Monovalent Vaccines is displayed for a photograph at a… vaccination clinic at St. Barnabas Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas, U.S., on Saturday, Dec. 5, 2009. Swine flu rates declined for the fifth straight week, with the lowest number of reported hospitalizations and deaths in more than two months, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Photographer: Matt Nager/Bloomberg
BLOOMBERG NEWS
It is widely agreed upon by health professionals that immunizations are one of the top few greatest advancement in public health on par with clean drinking water. However, despite the known success of vaccines in reducing morbidity and mortality, immunization rates remain relatively low across the U.S. in 2019, especially in the 19-35 month age range. But Americans who blame anti-vaccination parents arent considering the full immunization story in the United States.
Yes, those who do not vaccinate their children do play a role in our failing rates , but there are less known, more significant causes to poor immunization completion rates for children. Primarily, money and time.
Low immunization rates are the result of a misaligned financial incentive structure for vaccination providers, and thus, transferred to parents.
Follow The Money
Protect Against And Treat Covid
The United States has experienced five waves of the pandemic since 2020, including three in the past year that were driven by new variants. America experienced a wave of COVID-19 cases driven by the Alpha variant in early Spring 2021 a time when the U.S. vaccination program was administering a record number of vaccines every day. The Delta variant, which was more than twice as contagious as the original coronavirus strain, then swept across the country starting in Summer 2021, beginning in the South and spreading to the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions.
Omicron represented another step in the viruss evolution, and has been one of the most contagious viruses in history, causing record numbers of infections around the world over the past three months. However, because of both lower severity of the Omicron variant and a stronger level of population immunity from vaccinations, Omicron has caused relatively fewer cases of severe COVID-19. Compared to prior waves of COVID-19 in the United States, the Omicron wave has had a lower proportion of cases resulting in hospitalization or death.
America has weathered the current Omicron wave with minimal disruption schools and businesses largely remained open. As the country emerges from the Omicron wave,our path forward relies on maintaining and continually enhancing the numerous tools we now have to protect ourselves and our loved ones from vaccines, to tests, to treatments, to masks, and more.
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Is The United States Free Of Measles
The United States was among the first countries in the world to be declared free of measles as early as the year 2000. Still, the MMR vaccination coverage varies widely across the 50 states, with coverage ranging from 85.8% in Missouri to almost 98.3% in Massachusetts. These rates are among the highest when compared to the rest of the world, but concentrated efforts to improve these percentages continue to date.
Canada Could Face Similar Problems
Canadians are some of the most accepting of vaccines in the world. The global Ipsos survey from March found 79 per cent of Canadians would get a vaccine right away if its available.
But similar gaps in access remain. Federal data says 87 per cent of Canadian households have access to high-speed internet, a number that falls to less than 50 per cent for rural households. The College of Family Physicians of Canada has noted that while 18 per cent of Canadians live in rural areas, theyre served by only eight per cent of Canadas practising physicians.
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Ensure There Are Enough Treatments For Every American Who Needs Them
The U.S. government will procure additional treatments continue to use an expedited, streamlined process to review treatments for authorization by the FDA and accelerate research and development into next generation treatments. These efforts will require additional funding and authorities from Congress.
Update The Framework For Recommendations On Preventive Measures Like Masking To Reflect The Current State Of The Disease
Masks have been a critical tool to protect ourselves, but they have a time and a place. With a broad range of other protective tools in place, the CDC has announced an updated framework for guidance on preventive measures like masking moving away from simply basing broad recommendations on case counts and test positivity, and instead encouraging prevention measures like masking when they are most needed to minimize severe disease and to keep our hospitals from becoming overwhelmed in times when COVID-19 is surging. By monitoring community risk, masks can be worn when the risk of severe disease in the community is high and taken off when the risk is low. Overall, it means Americans will be wearing masks less because so many people are protected from severe disease.
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How Quickly Are Us Residents Getting Vaccinated
Larger percentages of the U.S. population have already been fully vaccinated or have received a booster shot compared with last year. So demand for the COVID-19 vaccine has declined. COVID-19 vaccine administration averaged 54 million every month between January and June of 2021. And between July and December 2021 that average was 30.5 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines administered per month. During this time, the CDC had approved booster shots and expanded eligibility to all adult Americans over 18 years old.
But between January and June 2022, the average monthly administration of COVID-19 vaccines was much lower at 14.5 million doses received every month.
In June, the number of people considered fully vaccinated climbed by about 980,000an increase of about 0.3% of the population. However, this was less than the 1.6 million who became fully vaccinated in May. This is the second consecutive month the vaccination rate has gone down and continues the downward trajectory that began in January 2022.
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Each map above takes a different approach to measuring percentages of the population who are boosted. The first map measures the boosted population against the total state population.
According to CDC data, 30% or more of the total population has received a COVID-19 booster in each of 25 states and Washington D.C. This includes Vermont, which has boosted 49% of its state populationthe highest rate in the country. On the other end of the spectrum, Alabama and North Carolina still have not reached an overall booster rate of 20%.
The second map compares the number of people who are fully vaccinated to the rate of individuals who have received a booster shot. In this case, Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Alabama have not reached a 40% booster rate among their states vaccinated population. And North Carolina has not reached 30% in terms of boosting its vaccinated population.
The gap in booster shot uptake between states overall population and those who are fully vaccinated is small in many cases, but some noticeable differences still exist.
Washington D.C. has the greatest disparity in how it ranks for boosting its vaccinated population versus its total state population. D.C. ranks 19th in terms of the percent of its total population that has been boosted, but 40th when measured against its vaccinated population. Washington D.C.s low ranking may be due to its high underlying vaccination rate.
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Facts About Americans And Coronavirus Vaccines
The coronavirus pandemic has claimed more than 670,000 lives in the United States as of Sept. 20, and the spread of the highly transmissible delta variant has added new urgency to the federal governments efforts to vaccinate all Americans against the virus. As the drive to inoculate more people continues, here are 10 facts about Americans and COVID-19 vaccines, based on an of more than 10,000 U.S. adults.
Pew Research Center published this analysis to examine how COVID-19 vaccination patterns in the United States differ by demographic, religious and political factors, and to assess broader public attitudes on key questions related to coronavirus vaccines. The findings in this analysis are based primarily on a survey of 10,348 U.S. adults, conducted from Aug. 23 to 29, 2021.
Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel , an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATPs methodology. Here are the questions asked in the August survey, along with responses, and its methodology.
The Pace Of Vaccinations Plateaued In The Us Uk And Israel
After the Food and Drug Administration authorized Pfizer and Moderna’s shots in December, the US got an early leg up in the global vaccination race. Israel, which purchased 15 million doses from Pfizer in the three months after the shots became available, also vaccinated its population quickly between December and March. And AstraZeneca’s vaccine, developed in the UK, was approved for emergency use there on December 30.
In mid-March, when the US, UK, and Israel were leading in inoculations, they had 3%, 13%, and 52% of their populations fully vaccinated, respectively.
But three months later, Israel’s vaccination rate had only ticked up to 59%. The US and UK had about 45% of their populations vaccinated a big jump by June 20, but by then, Chile and Aruba each had a vaccination rate above 50%.
In the three months since, Israel, the UK, and the US’s vaccination rates saw modest upticks, but at least a dozen countries including Uruguay, Spain, and Denmark have surpassed all three of them.
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Increase Efforts To Get Shots In Arms Around The World
The U.S. government will increase investment in the Initiative for Global Vaccine Access , an ambitious global vaccination initiative to get doses into arms by working with partner countries to more quickly implement their plans. This includes supporting efforts such as jumpstarting communications campaigns, providing and supporting vaccinators on the front lines, purchasing cold chain supplies and syringes, paying for shipping and logistics to expedite vaccine delivery to hard-to-reach areas, ensuring people at high risk of hospitalization and deaths like the elderly and immunocompromised are vaccinated, and building vaccine confidence on the ground. Expanded global shots-in-arms efforts will require additional funding from Congress.
A Quarter Of Americans Report Vaccine Skepticism
Morning Consult is conducting around 30,000 weekly survey interviews in the United States on the vaccine rollout, providing deep insights at a granular level into which segments of the population are most and least opposed to vaccinations, and what factors are driving skepticism. The latest data is based on surveys conducted from July 12-18, 2022, among 26,302 U.S. adults, with a margin of error of +/- 0.6%. Updates will be provided monthly. Get alerts with the latest data.
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Federal Data On Covid
The CDC reports demographic characteristics, including race/ethnicity, of people receiving COVID-19 vaccinations at the national level, including both people who have received one dose and people who have been recently vaccinated . CDC reports that as of July 6, 2022, race/ethnicity was known for 75% of people who had received at least one dose of the vaccine. White people make up a smaller share of people who have received at least one dose and people who have recently received a vaccination compared to their share of the total population . Black people make up 10% of people who recently received a vaccination, which is the same as their share of people who have received at least one dose , and smaller than their share of the total population , Hispanic people make up a larger share of vaccinated people and people who recently received a vaccination compared to their share of the total population . The overall share of vaccinated people who are Asian is similar to their share of total population , while they make up a larger share of people who recently got vaccinated .
While these data provide helpful insights at the national level, significant gaps in data remain to help understand who is and is not getting vaccinated. To date, CDC is not publicly reporting state-level data on the racial/ethnic composition of people vaccinated or receiving booster doses. Moreover, CDC is not reporting racial and ethnic data for vaccinations among children.