So many of us have moved on from the COVID-19 pandemic after three years and have gotten back to normal or at least accepted a new normal. That’s even though 250,000 American died from COVID last year.

A Penn State researcher says the new normal could be 90,000 to 120,000 deaths from COVID every year, unless more Americans get vaccinated – every year. That's compared to the high end of influenza deaths, which is about 50,000 a year.

On The Spark Monday, Dr. Maciej Boni, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University said only about 39% of Americans have been vaccinated against COVID in the last 12 months and those vaccination figures are what he's basing his estimate on,"The primary determinant, really the only important determinant of how many COVID cases, how many COVID hospitalizations and deaths we're going to see this year is COVID vaccination. And, of course, every country, every region, every state decides this differently. But the difference between being 100% vaccinated and 0% vaccinated is enormous. If we get vaccination rates up into the 80 to 90% range, maybe we could quash COVID to the point where it's millions of cases and thousands or perhaps 10,000 deaths a year. But if we relax fully and just tell everybody to stop getting vaccinated, and that worst case scenario, which I don't think we're going to do, but in that worst case scenario, we could get up into the multiple hundreds of thousands of deaths again."

Dr. Boni was asked why he thinks more people aren't getting vaccinated,"I think there's two main reasons. One is that I don't think the CDC has put enough effort into promoting and underlining the importance of vaccination. So this was done for other infectious diseases. This was done for measles, for example, in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And we don't have problems with measles vaccination coverage. Kids get measles shots before they're one year old. They get measles boosters, which are just measles vaccines before they go to school. And we're quite successful at getting these coverage levels very high. The CDC does a good job of promoting it, and we don't have any problems around it. So one basic problem is that the CDC hasn't planned or started a campaign to get this number up to the 90% range. I think the second problem is the disinformation that we have encountered over the last three years. So COVID is unique in that for no other infectious disease have we seen this level of coordinated disinformation campaigns getting into people's social media feeds, getting into the press, getting into the mouths of TV personalities. And this, I think, has caused a lot of distrust in people. So one important thing, I don't know how this is going to be done, but one important thing is to beat back a lot of the disinformation that I think has caused people to worry."

So many of us have moved on from the COVID-19 pandemic after three years and have gotten back to normal or at least accepted a new normal. That’s even though 250,000 American died from COVID last year.
A Penn State researcher says the new normal could be 90,000 to 120,000 deaths from COVID every year, unless more Americans get vaccinated – every year. That's compared to the high end of influenza deaths, which is about 50,000 a year.
On The Spark Monday, Dr. Maciej Boni, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University said only about 39% of Americans have been vaccinated against COVID in the last 12 months and those vaccination figures are what he's basing his estimate on,"The primary determinant, really the only important determinant of how many COVID cases, how many COVID hospitalizations and deaths we're going to see this year is COVID vaccination. And, of course, every country, every region, every state decides this differently. But the difference between being 100% vaccinated and 0% vaccinated is enormous. If we get vaccination rates up into the 80 to 90% range, maybe we could quash COVID to the point where it's millions of cases and thousands or perhaps 10,000 deaths a year. But if we relax fully and just tell everybody to stop getting vaccinated, and that worst case scenario, which I don't think we're going to do, but in that worst case scenario, we could get up into the multiple hundreds of thousands of deaths again."
Dr. Boni was asked why he thinks more people aren't getting vaccinated,"I think there's two main reasons. One is that I don't think the CDC has put enough effort into promoting and underlining the importance of vaccination. So this was done for other infectious diseases. This was done for measles, for example, in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And we don't have problems with measles vaccination coverage. Kids get measles shots before they're one year old. They get measles boosters, which are just measles vaccines before they go to school. And we're quite successful at getting these coverage levels very high. The CDC does a good job of promoting it, and we don't have any problems around it. So one basic problem is that the CDC hasn't planned or started a campaign to get this number up to the 90% range. I think the second problem is the disinformation that we have encountered over the last three years. So COVID is unique in that for no other infectious disease have we seen this level of coordinated disinformation campaigns getting into people's social media feeds, getting into the press, getting into the mouths of TV personalities. And this, I think, has caused a lot of distrust in people. So one important thing, I don't know how this is going to be done, but one important thing is to beat back a lot of the disinformation that I think has caused people to worry."

When people come together and talk about really interesting topics, great questions spark better understanding and opportunities for new ideas to form. On The Spark from WITF, hosts Scott LaMar and Aniya Faulcon start the conversations about what’s happening in the world and at home. Share your ideas at https://witf.org/programs/the-spark.

When people come together and talk about really interesting topics, great questions spark better understanding and opportunities for new ideas to form. On The Spark from <a href="https://www.witf.org">WITF</a>, hosts Scott LaMar and Aniya Faulcon start the conversations about what’s happening in the world and at home. Share your ideas at <a href="https://witf.org/programs/the-spark">https://witf.org/programs/the-spark</a>.

The Spark

When people come together and talk about really interesting topics, great questions spark better understanding and opportunities for new ideas to form. On The Spark from WITF, hosts Scott LaMar and Aniya Faulcon start the conversations about what’s happening in the world and at home. Share your ideas at <a href="https://witf.org/programs/the-spark">https://witf.org/programs/the-spark</a>.

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