What next?

The need to boost vaccination rates has penetrated even some “thick and numb Republican skulls,” said Kevin Williamson in NationalReview.com. Still, mandates are fiercely opposed by those on the Right who’ve embraced “selfharm as a kind of weird performance ritual.” Businesses, universities, and state governments alike should do what they can “to persuade the persuadable, imposing inconveniences and both informal and formal sanctions.” Think that’s un-American? “George Washington ordered his troops to be inoculated against smallpox during the Revolution.”

The U.S. could see its case rate nearly quadruple “in the next four to six weeks,” said Madeline Holcombe and Steve Almasy in CNN.com. If we follow a trajectory similar to Britain’s, “we could see as many as 200,000 cases a day,” said former CDC director Tom Frieden. “We’re heading into a rough time.” New cases of Delta have fallen off in Britain, though, and we may see the same here in the fall. Booster shots may be in store for some Americans in the coming months, said Sharon LaFraniere in The New York Times. Federal health officials now think seniors and those with compromised immune systems should get boosters, based on data showing dwindling effectiveness for the Pfizer vaccine. Israeli data show the vaccine dropped from 95 percent effectiveness at preventing infection from January to April to 39 percent effectiveness against Delta in late June and early July. Still, the vaccine “remained more than 90 percent effective at preventing severe disease.”

If more Americans had chosen to be vaccinated, the Delta virus would not have gotten any real traction, said Apoorva Mandavilli in The New York Times. Other, perhaps even more dangerous variants are “waiting in the wings,” and with at least 80 million holdouts keeping us from herd immunity, the U.S. remains highly vulnerable. “The unvaccinated will set the country on fire over and over again”—and they won’t be “the only ones who are singed.”