The Delta Variant Is the Symptom of a Bigger Threat: Vaccine Refusal - Yahoo! Voices

Jul 26, 2021

The more contagious Delta variant may be getting the blame, but fueling its rise is an older, more familiar foe: vaccine hesitancy and refusal, long pervasive in the United States.

Were a wider swath of the population vaccinated, there would be no resurgence — of the Delta variant, or Alpha variant, or any other version of the coronavirus.

It now accounts for about 83 percent of the infections in the United States.

The United States will be vulnerable to every one of them until it can immunize millions of people who now refuse to get the vaccine, are still persuadable but hesitant, or have not yet gained access.

Vaccinated people will be protected from severe illness and death, but there may be other consequences.

And some number of vaccinated people will become infected.

Breakthrough infections were expected to be vanishingly rare with the original virus, but recent data suggest they may be less so with the Delta variant.

It is roughly twice as contagious as the original coronavirus, and some early evidence hints that people infected with the variant carry the virus in much higher amounts.

“The larger the force of infection that comes from the pandemic in unvaccinated populations, the more breakthrough infections there will be,” Dr.

Most breakthrough infections produce few to no symptoms, but some may prompt illness in vaccinated people serious enough to lay them up in bed, miss work — and put their children or older relatives at risk.

Of the 39 percent of adults who are unvaccinated, about half say they are completely unwilling.

Even the national goal of having 70 percent of adults at least partially vaccinated by July 4 somehow became “Biden’s goal,” said Dr.

Fewer than half of House Republicans acknowledged being vaccinated in a CNN survey in May, compared with 100 percent of House Democrats.