When Americans divide themselves into camps, they stick to them fiercely: Democrats versus Republicans, pro-life versus pro-choice, gun rights versus gun control. Add to that, as has become apparent over the course of the past year, those who are pro- versus anti-coronavirus vaccines. As with so many other polarizing issues, your position on getting or not getting inoculated against COVID-19 has become more than a medical question. It’s morphed into a form of cultural identifier, a sign of your membership in one tribe or another.
More than ever, that’s becoming clear as booster shots are rolled out around the nation, with about 70 million Americans now eligible for an additional dose and tens of millions more set to join them as the eligibility age inevitably falls. The extra dose comes as very good news to a lot of the population—people who are mindful of the way vaccine-induced antibody levels fall over time and anxious to bump them back up. But that doesn't remotely include everybody, with resistance to even initial vaccinations keeping the country far from the much hoped-for herd immunity.
All of this is playing out as the government looks beyond first doses and encourages Americans to step up for their extra dose. Plenty of people are responding. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), booster rates are now exceeding first-shot rates across the country. In the week ending October 24, just over 400,000 people per day were getting boosters, compared to just over 200,000 receiving their first shots.
Those numbers have been moving in a sort of Newtonian, equal-and-opposite dance since late August, when more than 400,000 people daily were getting first doses and boosters were just being rolled out to the immunocompromised. The lines crossed in late September, when the CDC recommended Pfizer-BioNTech boosters for at-risk groups, and the upward trend for boosters and downward trend for first shots has continued since. Boosters got another bump on October 21, when the CDC approved additional doses of the Moderna and J&J vaccines.
Those recommendations, CDC director Rochelle Walensky said in a statement last week, “are another example of our fundamental commitment to protect as many people as possible from COVID-19.” When it comes to the boosters, the government’s pro-vaccine message is apparently being heard. When it comes to first doses, not so much.
TODAY'S CORONAVIRUS OUTLOOK
About 503.5 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped to various U.S. states as of last night, of which more than 414.3 million doses have been administered thus far, according to TIME's vaccine tracker. About 57.4% of Americans have been completely vaccinated.
More than 244 million people around the world had been diagnosed with COVID-19 as of 1 a.m. E.T. today, and more than 4.95 million people have died. On Oct. 25, there were 389,011 new cases and 6,164 new deaths confirmed globally.
Here's how the world as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
And here's every country that has reported over 4.7 million cases:
The U.S. had recorded more than 45.5 million coronavirus cases as of 1 a.m. E.T. today. More than 737,000 people have died. On Oct. 25, there were 101,323 new cases and 1,375 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
Here's how the country as a whole is currently trending:
Here's where daily cases have risen or fallen over the last 14 days, shown in confirmed cases per 100,000 residents:
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of Oct. 25, 1 a.m. E.T. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
WHAT ELSE YOU SHOULD KNOW
An independent panel advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is meeting today to determine whether to recommend emergency use authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in kids aged 5 to 11. As the Washington Postreports, the panel is expected to vote before the end of the day on whether the benefits of the vaccine outweigh its risks. The FDA is not required to follow the panel’s recommendation, which would apply to about 28 million children in the U.S., but it typically does.
NASA has been pulled into the vaccine wars as workers at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Hancock, Miss., plan a prayer rally today to protest government vaccine mandates, reports the Associated Press. Under Biden Administration rules, all federal contractor employees must be vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 8. The facility—a NASA rocket test site—is expecting roughly 100 workers and family members to join the demonstration. A spokesperson insisted that the center is “continuing preparations to adhere, as required, to the president’s executive order on COVID-19.”
The CDC has added Ukraine to its list of “very high risk”travel destinations. The CDC warns that even fully vaccinated travelers “may be at risk of getting and spreading COVID-19 variants” in the country. As CNN reports, the move, while bad news for Ukraine, represents progress for the world. It is the second week in a row that the CDC added only one travel destination to its list. (Last week it was Singapore.) As recently as early August, the agency added 16 countries in a single week.
Moderna will sell 110 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine to African nations, reports the New York Times. That’s welcome news for a continent that’s been suffering vaccine shortages, but the shots won’t be coming soon: Moderna will deliver 15 million doses by the end of this year, 35 million more by March and the rest sometime after. The company does have plans to begin bottling COVID-19 vaccines on the African continent sometime in 2023 and has said it will also be opening a factory there at an unspecified date.
China is starting to vaccinate children as young as 3, the Associated Press reports. The rollout has begun relatively slowly, with local governments in five provinces announcing vaccine mandates for children aged 3 to 11. The move is, in some respects, premature, based only on successful Phase 1 and 2 trials of its Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines in children. China’s aggressive vaccine policy has helped the country fully vaccinate 1.07 billion of its 1.4 billion people, for a 76% vaccination rate.
Financial incentives and other nudges like public service announcements do not increase vaccine uptake, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research and reporting by The Wall Street Journal. The study, based on surveys conducted in California’s 1.1-million population Contra Costa County, found that public service messaging in particular increased people’s intentions to get vaccinated but that those intentions did not translate into follow-through. No surprise, politics played a role too, with supporters of former President Donald Trump actually becoming less likely to get vaccinated after hearing public service announcements or being offered financial incentives.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com. If you have specific questions you'd like us to answer, please send them to covidquestions@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Jeffrey Kluger and edited by Angela Haupt.
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