The dramatic rise of the omicron variant has renewed medical experts’ warnings about the need for Americans to start taking the pandemic more seriously. Considering the generally low levels of vaccination in the U.S. relative to other wealthy countries, the CDC recommends that all Americans get vaccinated as the best means of protecting against severe illness from the variant, which has quickly overtaken delta as the dominant COVID strain in the U.S. Reporting from the first week and a half of December found that only 12 percent of new COVID-19 cases were from omicron; alarmingly, that had skyrocketed to 73 percent of new cases by the end of the third week of the month.

America is seriously divided on the vaccination question. And one doesn’t have to go far to see headlines emphasizing the partisan nature of anti-vax sentiment. Stories placing partisanship at the center of the conflict are everywhere, with titles like: “Inside the Growing Alliance Between Anti-Vaccine Activists and Pro-Trump Republicans,” “Republicans Seize on Federal […]