Almost nobody is taking the bivalent booster
By 
I got my shot of the recently-released COVID booster earlier this week. This puts me in a very small minority:
Joe Gonzales, 37, said he knows there’s still a risk of getting covid — he believes he was infected with the virus this summer. But after getting two doses of the vaccine, the Flower Mound, Tex., man doesn’t understand why he needs the third and fourth “booster” shots urged by federal health officials.
“And then the president is saying things like, ‘The pandemic is over,’ ” Gonzales said of President Biden’s comments during a recent “60 Minutes” interview. “That doesn’t help” motivate him to get a shot.
Gonzales’s lack of urgency typifies the view of many Americans, worn down by a never-ending pandemic and unsure about next steps as the nation enters its third covid winter. Some have stopped paying attention to health officials’ recommendations altogether, despite projections of a fall and winter wave with the potential to sicken millions and kill tens of thousands,particularly the elderly and sick. About half of Americans say they’ve heard little or nothing about the shots, according to a recent tracking poll by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
“We have got to explain the value of these vaccines for the American people … [and] why this is probably the single most important health intervention they can make right now to protect themselves and their health for the next three to six months,” Ashish Jha, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, said in an interview.
Federal officials have spent the past year urging Americans to get booster shots to bolster their protection against the coronavirus, which wanes over time. In early September, they rushed out the first new shots — reformulated to target the still-dominant omicron variants — to give people time to get inoculated before a likely cold weather surge, when respiratory infections increase as people head indoors, and recommended that all Americans 12 and older receive a third and fourth dose of vaccine.
But the campaigns have lagged badly. Only about 105 million U.S. adults — roughly 40 percent — have received the third shot of vaccine initially offered a year ago, according to federal data, a far lower rate than countries like the United Kingdom, where more than 70 percent of adults have gotten a third dose. That figure is also well behind the 200 million U.S. adults who completed their primary series of shots.
This illustrates the complexity of public health messaging. I understand why non-vaccine protective measures have been almost entirely abandoned, and rationally there’s no contradiction between “unenforced mask mandates aren’t worth continuing” and “the benefits of getting boosted vastly exceed the costs, especially in an environment where no other measures are being taken.” But practically it’s hard to convince people to get the boosters when the rest of the messaging indicates that the pandemic is basically over.