“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
Usually this is true. But not always. Let’s peer into the crystal ball, shall we?
By July 4th, 2021 — almost exactly two months from today — almost all Americans that are dying of Covid will be people who refused the vaccine.
Around this same day, many other people who refused the vaccine will be making a big stink about all the liberties they perceive themselves as “losing forever”. If you read my last piece you should know that this is a somewhat hysterical assumption that is not ratified by a casual study of history. That is, liberties curtailed in the name of response to emergencies do typically return when the emergency has passed. But I digress. The point is, the dauntless libertarians will keep on doing what dauntless libertarians do, which is to complain on Twitter about their receding liberties, while calling everyone else “sheeple”, etc.
“Herd immunity” was not a phrase coined to appeal to libertarians, I guess.
Anyway the point is that by July 4th the rest of the country will basically just be watching vaccine resisters die. The overall death numbers probably won’t be that bad, thanks, well, to the vaccine. But by now we have an good idea that the efficacy of the vaccine is extremely high, at least against the now-prevalent variants. By “extremely high” I mean that almost no one who is fully vaccinated dies from or has to be hospitalized because of a subsequent infection. And that means soon it will only be the people who have refused the vaccine that will be dying of COVID.
The poor fools have dug themselves in pretty good. It is not clear what amount of data or standard of evidence would suffice to get them to swallow their pride and roll up their sleeve for the injection. But it’s going to get hard to keep holding this position.
My prediction is that around July 4th you’ll see a kind of “last gasp” of people crying “muh liberties!” The grifters who have made their social media careers out of being COVID deniers, down-players, and obstructionists will no doubt keep on spinning the fantastic conspiracy theories that akshually no one is dying of COVID, that it’s all just a big conspiracy to fill us all with fear so that we hand our liberties over to the dad-blamed guvverment!
But this already implausible theory gets less plausible when that government is reporting falling death numbers, and lifting the very restrictions they have been railing against — while the pandemic continues to rage in much of the rest of the world.
It’s the end of the road for the anti-vaxx narrative.
After that I expect that you’ll see a lot of people who even now are daily posting anti-vaccine screeds start to avoid the topic, and even adjacent topics. You’ll see them post a lot of summer vacation pictures, or selfies from restaurant porches — unless, of course, they are laid up with COVID.
And eventually something magical will start to happen. You will know it has happened when the number of recorded vaccinations exceeds the number inferred from self-reported vaccinations. Eventually, many erstwhile vaccine resisters will — quietly and without fanfare — go and get the damn shot.
But most of them will probably never admit it.