The Long Shot
In a year when it felt as though an avalanche of information overcame us every day, December 14, 2020, managed to stand apart. News alerts announced the first Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were being administered locally and across the country. Within the same 24-hour period, phones everywhere pinged with the heartbreaking news that the United States had surpassed 300,000 coronavirus-related deaths, more than any other nation.
While many will remember that winter Monday for delivering a small dose of hope in a deeply unsettling year, the maiden COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t ever going to be a solution in and of itself. Politicized in the runup to the November election, developed on a breakneck timeline, and made available through an emergency use authorization, the prophylactic still had to face public opinion. Surveys in November and December found that anywhere between 27 and 39 percent of American adults said they probably or definitely would not get inoculated. Early doses were redirected as even some health care workers opted out.
Immunizations, as we all know, are a complicated answer to what seems like a clear-cut question: How do we prevent the spread of infectious diseases? But since British physician Edward Jenner developed the world’s first modern vaccine in 1796—for smallpox—it has been made clear again and again that nothing about inoculations is straightforward.
This is not only because of the complexities involved in their creations, but also because of the fact that they require a certain threshold of people to get them in order to be effective. For COVID-19, experts say the required rate is around 70 to 80 percent of the U.S. population. That means the number of
