We knew these numbers would go this way
If the weather man told you the current temperature, and then gave you a long term forecast that was based on the premise that the temperature would remain exactly the same for weeks and months to come, you’d change the channel, right? You don’t have to be a weather man to know that temperatures tend to go down at night, up in the summer, and so on.
When the COVID vaccine first became available in the United States, polling at the time showed that nearly a quarter of Americans said they would “never” get vaccinated. This led large chunks of the media to make doomsday predictions about how vaccination efforts would fail and so on.
At the time, I pointed out that the percentage of Americans unwilling to get vaccinated would end up dropping significantly. After all, not all of the naysayers were anti-vaxxer lunatics; plenty of them were merely skeptics who were going to change their minds once they saw that the people in their lives who had been vaccinated were doing just fine. It seemed as obvious that this poll number would drop as it is obvious that temperatures drop in the winter.
Sure enough, new polling shows that just 13% of Americans still say they’ll “never” get vaccinated. That’s still a lot of dummies. But it’s barely half of what the number was six months ago. The media should have acknowledged from the start that the original 24% number was obviously going to sharply drop as the year went on, instead of pretending the 24% number was locked in place so it could run with doomsday headlines.
