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Associated Press
- December 15, 2021 08:00
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One of the great missed opportunities of the COVID-19 pandemic is the avoidance of vaccination by many Americans. This fall, Rachel McKibbens, 45, lost her father and brother to COVID-19. Both had refused to be vaccinated because they believed in false conspiracy theories that the doses contained poison
A year ago, the largest vaccination drive in American history began with enthusiasm in a bleak December. Trucks loaded with frozen vials of the COVID-19 vaccine, which has proven wildly successful in clinical trials, rolled out across the country, bringing doses that many hoped would signal the end of this crisis.
This had not happened. A year later, many Americans remain unvaccinated, and many more are dying.
The country's death toll from COVID-19 is around 800,000, as the anniversary of the first vaccine approaches. Last year the number was around 300,000. An untold number of lives, perhaps tens of thousands, have been saved by vaccination. But what could have been a time to celebrate scientific achievement has been filled with controversy and mourning.
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, has said that scientists and health officials may have underestimated how the spread of misinformation could hinder the "amazing achievement" of vaccines.
"Deaths continue...most of them are from the unvaccinated, most of them because someone somewhere has fed them the information that this is categorically bad and dangerous", said Collins.
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Developed and distributed rapidly, vaccines have proven extremely safe and effective in preventing deaths and hospitalizations. Unvaccinated people have a 14 times higher risk of dying compared to fully vaccinated people, according to estimates made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on data available as of September.
The effect of vaccines
Their effectiveness has been maintained for the most part, allowing schools to reopen, restaurants to welcome people and families to gather for the holidays. At last count, 95% of Americans 65 and older had at least been vaccinated with the first dose.
"In terms of scientific achievements, in public health and logistics, this is in the same category as the man going to the moon", explained Dr. David Dowdy, infectious disease epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomerang School of Public Health.
The first year of vaccines has been difficult with a disappointment over rising infections, political wrangling over mandates and now, concerns about whether the mutant Omicron will evade protection.
Despite all this, Dowdy said, "when we look back, we will say that vaccines were a great success."
On the very day an eager nation began rolling up its sleeves, December 14, 2020, the death toll in the US had reached 300,000. And deaths were averaging more than 2,500 a day and rising fast, more than what the country witnessed during the bitter spring of 2020, when New York City was the epicenter of the outbreak in the US.
By the end of February, the US death toll had passed 500,000, but the daily death toll was falling from the terrifying heights of early January. With hopes rising, in early March, some states began to reopen, lifting mask requirements and indoor restrictions. Former President Donald Trump, during an interview with Fox News, assured his supporters that the vaccine is safe and urged them to take it.
However, by June, as the threat from COVID-19 faded, demand for vaccines had dropped, and states and companies turned to incentives, trying to revive interest in vaccination.
It was a little late. Delta, a highly contagious mutated form of the coronavirus, arrived quietly and began to spread quickly, finding many unvaccinated victims.
"You have to be almost perfect all the time to fight this virus," said Andrew Novmer, professor of public health at the University of California, Irvine. "It's not just the vaccine that's causing the pandemic to wreak havoc on Earth again."
One of the great missed opportunities of the COVID-19 pandemic is the avoidance of vaccination by many Americans.
This fall, Rachel McKibbens, 45, lost her father and brother to COVID-19. Both had refused to be vaccinated because they believed in false conspiracy theories that the doses contained poison.
"What a shameful tragedy," said McKibbens. "It didn't have to happen this way."
According to an analysis by the Associated Press, more than 228,500 Americans have died from COVID-19 since April 19, the date when all American adults were ready to be vaccinated. That's about 29% of the count since America's first coronavirus deaths were reported in February 2020.
In total, two states — Florida and Texas — contributed more than 52,000 deaths since that date. Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, Wyoming and Idaho also saw high death tolls in mid-April.
Republicans and Democrats
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Republican states were more likely than Democratic states to have a higher average number of deaths since then.
"It seems to me that the USA is in a camp", said Novmer. "Vaccines have become a litmus test for trust in the government."
Wyoming and West Virginia, the states with the highest percentage of votes for Donald Trump in 2016, have recorded about 50% of their total deaths from COVID-19 since all adults declared themselves ready for vaccination in these states. In Oklahoma approximately 60% of the deaths from COVID-19 occurred after all adults were ready for vaccination.
There are exceptions: Notably, Hawaii and Oregon, the only states supporting Joe Biden, where more than half of the COVOD-19 deaths came after doses were distributed to adults. North and South Dakota — both Trump hotbed states — have sustained their share of deaths, as the vaccine became available across the board up to 25%.
California has seen more than 15,000 deaths from COVID-19 since the state opened the vaccination option to all adults in mid-April. McKibbens' father and brother had died in Santa Ana, California, in the home they shared.
McKibbens pieced together all the pieces of the story from the messages on the brother's phone. Some of the messages she had read after his death included messages where a cousin mentioned TikTok to him as a source of bad advice.
"The brother had not sought medical help for the father," leaving him lying even as his breathing began to sound like a broken engine, said McKibbens, who lives in Rochester, New York.
Her father, Pete Camacho, died on October 22 at the age of 67. McKibbens has traveled from California to help with arrangements.
Misinformation
Her brother was also sick, but "he refused to let me enter the house, because he told me that I was spreading the coronavirus because I have been vaccinated", she recalled. "It was a strange new belief that I had never heard of before."
A friend had found her brother's body after noticing the untouched orders in the entryway. Peter Camacho, named after his father, died on November 8 at the age of 44.
Important advice for someone came too late. Seven months pregnant and unvaccinated, Tamara Alves Rodriguez tested positive for the coronavirus on August 9. Two days later with many pregnant women falling seriously ill, US health officials strengthened their guidelines, urging all expectant mothers to be vaccinated.
Rodriguez had tried to get vaccinated weeks earlier, but was told at a pharmacy that she needed an authorization from her doctor. "She never went," said her sister, Tanya Alves of Weston, Florida.
Six days after testing positive, Rodriguez had to have a breathing tube put down her throat at a hospital near her home in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her baby girl was born by emergency C-section on August 16.
The new mother never held her baby. Rodriguez died on October 30 at the age of 24. She is survived by her husband, two other children and an extended family.
"Her children constantly ask about her," said Alves. "I feel like a part of me has been taken away that even these words are not enough to describe it."
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She calls on others to get vaccinated: "If you knew the horror of being hospitalized or having a loved one there...if people knew that, they would be afraid, instead of being afraid of the vaccine."
Translated by: Blerta Haxhiu
