The new American dividing line
Dividing lines among Americans have always been there, politically, socially, economically, you name it. Now we’re facing a whole new kind of divide – and while it may end up being a temporary one, it’s rapidly becoming a growing divide.
Thanks to the aggressive competence of the Biden administration, millions of Americans are now being vaccinated per day. The process is moving so rapidly, several states are now opening up eligibility to every adult regardless of age. And as best the experts can tell, the vaccines are still holding up against COVID variants and mutations.
Yet even as this plays out, COVID case numbers among unvaccinated Americans continue to worsen. It’s getting bad enough that over the weekend, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky spoke of “impending doom” if we don’t find a way to get the spread of COVID among unvaccinated people under control.
So now we’re looking at something of a two-class system. There are the vaccinated, who are rather safe. Then there are the unvaccinated, who are increasingly falling ill. That’s inherently unfair, given that not all Americans have had the opportunity to get vaccinated yet.
The good news is that the vaccine is rapidly becoming available to all Americans who want it. It’ll then become incumbent upon us to convince as many of the vaccination holdouts to get vaccinated as soon as possible, so we can try to reach herd immunity more quickly. At any given point in time there is a sliver of the population who is legitimately too ill, frail, or compromised to get vaccinated, and we need herd immunity in order to protect those people.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to have an increasingly odd two-class system in the United States. Data suggests that Republicans in general, and Republican men in particular, are the most hesitant to get the vaccine. So when this is all said and done, the vaccinated vs unvaccinated divide could end up looking a lot like the existing divide between real Americans and Trump supporters.
