The Life of the Unvaccinated American Adult Is About to Become Very Difficult

Good.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for vaccine passports. Human beings would act rationally, in their own self-interest, out of their own desire to return to a post-pandemic world (whatever that looks like), and just get the shots that will help save their lives and the lives of the people around them. We are closer to this than it might seem. It should be remembered that, as of August 2, 70 percent of the adult population has received at least one shot of the Covid-19 vaccine. Seventy percent is a lot! Seventy percent is a victory: It is difficult to get 70 percent of American adults to agree on anything.

Unfortunately, 70 percent isn’t enough. This is an underrated and underappreciated aspect of the challenge to get all Americans vaccinated: You need to get a larger percentage of the population to care about the rest of the population than, uh, the percentage of the population that actually does care about the rest of the population. It is almost like a national health filibuster. It’s not enough to get 70 percent of American adults on the same page; that 30 percent is ruining it for everyone else. That 30 percent is stopping the rest of us from getting anything done. It is moving us all backwards.

It is thus perfectly reasonable that that 70 percent is increasingly deciding that enough is enough. On Tuesday morning, New York City announced that proof of vaccination will be required for all indoor dining and fitness gyms. They will be far from the last municipality to do so. (If anything, NYC, which is above the national average for vaccinations, needs to do this less than many other cities.) Many colleges and universities are requiring all students and faculty to be vaccinated, and federal courts have made it clear they’re legally able to do so. Even NFL teams are firing coaches who don’t get vaccinated, not because they’re jerks, but because the NFL has made it so oppressively difficult for coaches to do their jobs if they’re not vaccinated (they can’t be on the sideline, they can’t run indoor meetings, they can’t travel with the team) that keeping an unvaccinated employee on the payroll is simply not worth the trouble.