Along political lines, the United States has become a global vaccine laggard, the percentage of its population inoculated lower than dozens of other nations, including all of its peers in the Group of Seven countries, reported USA Today on Monday.

 

In many cases, the gap has become massive. Fifty million more Americans would be fully vaccinated if the United States had been able to match Canada's enthusiasm for shots, for example. "Supply isn't the problem -- a complicated and confounding lack of demand is to blame," said the report.

 

"The United States is very unusual," said Michael Bang Petersen, a professor at Denmark's Aarhus University who leads a project on how the so-called democracies respond to COVID-19, adding that Americans have uniquely politicized the virus response, undermining the demand for vaccination.

 

The result has been that "U.S. vaccination rates vary widely between states and closely track along political lines," said the report.

 

"Being a Democrat is one of the best predictors of being vaccinated," said Dr. Celine Gounder, an infectious disease specialist who was a member of the Biden-Harris Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. For some conservatives, opposition to vaccine mandates has become "the ultimate test of loyalty to your in-group," she said.

 

On Monday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated that 216,889,814 people have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine, making up 65.3 percent of the whole U.S. population; fully vaccinated people stood at 187,215,471, accounting for 56.4 percent of the total. A total of 7,786,263 people, or 4.2 percent of fully vaccinated group, received booster shots.