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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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7.9% is an extremely low vaccination rate. Normally when people talk about being worried about "low" vaccination rates, they mean 95% or 90%. And COVID-19 is both more dangerous and more common than many of the illnesses we vaccinate children for. If you for some reason decided you had a limited number of vaccinations budget and were rationally optimizing which childhood vaccinations to omit to maximize wellbeing, COVID-19 would not be your first pick (not sure exactly what would be... probably chickenpox? They all suck, this is a terrible choice to be making.). But that's clearly not the optimization people are making; somehow they (and/or their pediatricians) haven't gotten the message that it's actually an important vaccination. And we're going to have a lot more children with long-term health consequences (some of them dead) because of that.

(I'm having trouble finding definitions on their website of what they mean by "up-to-date": the relevant thing to care about is getting the full 3-dose series; past that, for most people, additional doses at best give an ~3 month window of protection from infection, but no significant additional protection from severe disease/death, so the public health benefit is minimal.)