Among the people who have decided not to participate in the COVID-19 vaccination program, some of them observed that the drug had been rushed into production, and that because it was only available through an emergency use authorization, they would wait until the Food and Drug Administration formally approved it before getting their shots.
But if nationwide vaccination rates are any indication, a lot of the people who said they were waiting on the FDA to act have not taken corresponding action of their own.
Christopher Ingraham, author of TheWhyAxis@substack.com, reports that federal statistics show no significant change in the number of vaccinations since the FDA approved the two-shot Pfizer vaccine on Aug. 23 — which is more than two weeks ago.
A chart with Ingraham’s report showed that about half a million people per day were getting vaccinated on July 10. That was the low point of vaccinations this year, but as more people became aware this summer of the delta variant’s danger, the inoculation count began to increase.
It hit 800,000 per day in mid-August, and after the Aug. 23 Pfizer approval, kept rising to about 950,000 at the end of the month. Since then, in short order, it’s tumbled all the way back down to 800,000 per day, though Ingraham says its possible that Labor Day holiday plans or health agency reporting gaps have artifically increased that decline.
“We’re interested in the trajectory of the line before and after the August 23 announcement,” Ingraham wrote. “If it caused a significant number of unvaccinated to get their shots, we’d expect to see some sort of spike or acceleration in the daily numbers. Alas, we emphatically do not see that.”
He’s right. Even though the number of vaccinations increased in late August, after the FDA approved the Pfizer shots, that was just the continuation of an upward trend that started in July. There has been no spike upward, which most likely means that the people who said they were waiting for the FDA to act are now waiting for something else.
One possible answer is that a lot of the people waiting on the FDA simply haven’t gotten around to getting vaccinated yet. But Ingraham probably is correct when he theorizes that a lot of the people who said they were waiting for FDA approval simply were using that as a dodge, and never planned to get the shots.
That’s their decision to make. And it’s true that odds of an unvaccinated person becoming seriously ill from a COVID-19 infection are still very small — perhaps 1 in 100. Those are great odds — until they turn against you.
