Two Americas

Writing in The Atlantic, Sarah Zhang says that America’s vaccine future is fragmenting:

Earlier this year, the Biden administration set a goal of partially vaccinating at least 70 percent of adults by Independence Day. The U.S. will narrowly miss the mark; the number is currently hovering around 67 percent. When you zoom in closer, though, we’re doing both better and worse than that, depending on where you look. Our pandemic fates have diverged. The plateauing national case numbers obscure two simultaneous trends: an uptick in several sparsely vaccinated states and continued declines in well-vaccinated ones.

And some states vary widely from region to region. That’s a subject of conversation in our household almost every day. Our congressional district, Illinois-15, represented by Mary Miller, continues to have the lowest vaccination rate in the state.

We sent Miller a letter nearly a month ago asking what steps she has taken and will take to encourage vaccination in her district. No reply. No surprise. She’s busy! Witness her recent trip to the U .S.–Mexico border.