Definitely not the direction we would have gone for this week's "Meet The Press" considering it is Independence Day here in the States. We're 245 years old, by the way. Maybe discussing the state of our democracy and the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution would have been more appropriate for today given the fragile state that it's in at present, but we get it. President Biden set Independence Day as the date for his goal of having at least 70 percent of adult in the U.S. vaccinated with at least one shot, against Covid-19 so where are we?
We've fallen short of that goal, but for the administration's part it has provided enough doses so that every person has easy access to a free vaccination. However, what we see, as Dr. Fauci described, are regions of the country where the vaccination rate is low are seeing increased infections and hospitalizations due the new highly transmittable delta variant of the virus.
Regional outbreaks... The lowest vaccination rates are in the Southern regional states and other that with the exception of North Carolina are all run by Republican governors who either made a political issue out of the vaccine or didn't push hard enough to dispell misinformation. Mississippi has the lowest vacination rate in the United States... for once, just once we'd like to see Mississippi not bringing up the rear, but here we are... again.
There are many who have genuine concerns about getting vaccinated and for vaccines in general, what ever they are it's understandable, but given above how can one say that it hasn't been politicized? The sad political commentary about this is that a Republican president continuously touted the speed in which the vaccine was coming and delivered but because he lost the election and it was left to a Democratic president to distribute it and then encourage people to get vaccinated.
Because of politics, people don't want to listen. Yet, we have the foremost expert on infectious disease in the world telling us that 99.2 percent of the deaths occuring right now in the United States are among the unvaccinated, and are 'entirely avoidable and preventable,' Dr. Fauci explained.
With all that, this holiday weekend is being viewed as a beginning to 'getting back to normal,' but it's going to be a long time in the making, if it's coming back at all. Most of us would agree with NPR's Audie Cornish that "normal left a long time ago." We add: on so many levels...
A lot of the panel discussion focused on physically going back to work and the overall change in work culture. Interestingly, psychologist Adam Grant explained that flexibility in the workforce (hybrid) should be the way going forward citing a study in which people working from home were 13 percent more productive. But employers, especially corporations, are willing to eat that 13 percent in productivity as they have too much invested in infrastructure and they want bodies in seats, thinking that there will be greater accountability. Time will tell, but 'normal,' yeah, not so much.
NBC's Kate Snow viewed this summer's opening up as a mental health reset. And damn, do we all need it.
HAPPY FOURTH EVERYONE, and thank you as always for reading.
Panel: Audie Cornish, NPR; Kate Snow, NBC; Adam Grant, psychologist
No comments:
Post a Comment