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Vaccines are super popular

While unvaccinated Americans continue to create enormous problems in our country in terms of increasing infection rates, mounting deaths due to COVID-19, and worst of all, the overwhelming of hospital resources and staff, here is a fact we should keep in mind:
 
The United States has now vaccinated 70 percent of adults with at least one shot against COVID-19, making vaccination one of the most popular and shared experiences across the entire country.
 
COVID-19 vaccination has now passed the 69 percent of Americans who use Facebook, the 65 percent who drink alcohol, the 63 percent who like any sport team, the 62 percent who voted in 2020, and the 56 percent who have cable or satellite television.
 
Being vaccinated against COVID-19 is now more popular than drinking alcohol and watching football in America.  
 
It is quite literally one of the most popular things to do in our country. 
 
This is sometimes easy to forget this given the volume, agitation, and violence of those opposed to vaccination. It’s easy to forget how incredibly popular vaccination is given the burden that the unvaccinated are putting on our healthcare system and their incessant mewling. 
 
They seem to be everywhere. Billboards. Churches. State houses. Protesting on street corners. Constantly appearing on the news. 
 
Sometimes for the worst of reasons. 
 
In the month of August alone, FIVE conservative radio hosts who aggressively preached against vaccination and the use of masks died from COVID-19.
 
Self-described “Mr. Anti-Vax” Marc Bernier succumbed to the virus last week.
 
Earlier in August, the death included:
 
Phil Valentine, a popular radio host in Tennessee who advised listeners not in “high-risk” categories to not get the vaccine.
 
Jimmy DeYoung, a nationally syndicated Christian preacher also based in Tennessee who argued that the vaccine was a widespread attempt by the government to sterilize its citizens.
 
Dick Farrel, who had worked for stations in Miami and Palm Beach, as well as for the conservative Newsmax TV channel, who declared the pandemic a “scam-demic” and asserted that Anthony Fauci invented the delta variant to keep Americans from living their lives.
 
Tod Tucker, a pro-Trump radio programmer and occasional host in Daytona who referred to people who took the vaccine as “idiot lab rats.”
 
Four of these stupid men retracted their opposition to vaccines and masks in their dying days. Too late for them, of course, but perhaps it will change the minds of their listeners.
 
It’s easy to become despondent over the state of the pandemic given stories like this. It’s easy to give up hope given the rise of the delta variant, the soaring infection rates in certain parts of our country, and all the noise that the anti-vaxxers are making.
 
But remember this:
 
If you’re vaccinated, you are amongst the vast majority of Americans who have also done so. Most of us have done our jobs. We got vaccinated for the benefit of ourselves, the people around us, and our country.
 
We tend to throw fewer fits in airports, protest less often at state capitals, drive around with fewer American flags affixed to the back of our pickup trucks, punch fewer flight attendants, and pay for fewer billboards promoting our ridiculous causes. We are generally an enormous but quieter group of people who go about our business doing the right thing for those around us without screaming about it. 
 
We are in the vast majority of reasonable, rational Americans who believe on science, public health, and doing the right thing. 
 
Vaccination is exceedingly popular in America.
 
One of the most popular things in America today.
 
Not yet popular enough to bring this pandemic to an end, but not nearly as unpopular as the loud, angry, belligerent, sometimes violent anti-vaxxers might have you believe.