Vaccinations At Scale

There was a day in the last week when four million americans got a Covid vaccine. That’s more than one percent of all citizens of the US. One in every hundred people in the US got vaccinated on the same day. Think about that!

Mayor de Blasio tweeted yesterday that 4.7 million doses of the Covid vaccine have been given out in NYC. Assuming that 2/3 of those have gone into new arms and 1/3 have gone into returning arms, that means almost 40% of adults in NYC have gotten introduced to the Coronavirus via a vaccine.

As an aside, another 20-30% of people in NYC got introduced to this nasty and deadly virus the old fashioned way and that means that we could have two thirds of adults in NYC with Covid antibodies in their systems.

But returning to the point of this post, we are vaccinating at scale in the US now.

One of my favorite Churchill quotes is:

You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.

That’s not exactly what is going on here but it is not far from it. While the US got a lot wrong in the first year of Covid and way too many people died as a result, we got one thing right. We bet on vaccines and we have now operationalized the delivery of them.

This is not a political point. The last administration should get as much, or more, credit for vaccines as the current one.

This is about me being proud to be an american once again. This mass vaccination is a beautiful thing to behold. It is breathtaking in its scale and it’s efficacy. It fills me with joy.