As politicians battle over masks and mandates, heated rhetoric has been used to describe the fourth heartbreaking surge in COVID as a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.”
While it may serve to further divide red and blue states, I disagree with the assertion that the current surge in cases is driven simply by the unvaccinated. Why? First, the premise would assume complete efficacy with our vaccinated population, which is statistically incorrect (at least 15 million of the US population never completed a second round of injections), which means they were not considered “fully vaccinated.”
Alternately, we need to examine what has occurred in nations with significantly higher vaccination rates than ours (the UK and Israel) to realize that variants have overrun the dramatic success achieved in those countries as well. Israel, once considered to be the most vaccinated country in the world, is facing a brutal fourth wave of COVID that has sent the country spiraling into another heartbreaking lockdown.
The unvaccinated could hardly be blamed for what is happening in either of these highly vaccinated countries.
The Concept of Blame
So why use blame? It defeats the purpose of encouraging those who are hesitant or possibly misinformed or disenfranchised to move forward.
