743,000 doses of the vaccine are being administered every day in the US

Some much-needed context, and a bit of good news, for the doom-and-gloom vaccine debate.

Behold this chart:

When I looked at this chart yesterday (here’s the link, the info is updated constantly) the number was a bit higher, and just before that a bit lower and just before that it was just under 1 million vaccines issued to Americans per day, on average. That’s way down from the peak in April of over 3 million per day, but still a pretty big number. YUGE as our former POTUS would say.

743,000 vaccine doses a day, on average, jabbed into American arms is nothing to scoff at and nothing short of miraculous. You get to 10 million doses in just two weeks. Clearly many Americans who were on the fence about the vaccine are coming around.

That’s good news. That’s the kind of news you’d think would put a clamp down on both all the doom-and-gloom coverage we see out there and on government overreach like vaccine mandates. If we’re on the right track already, why not just stay the course?

I won’t go to far down this rabbit hole. Suffice to say, a little good news shimmering from the darkness never hurts. We have enough bad to keep us busy and stressed out all the time. Let’s savor this good news for a while instead. The New York Times highlights that this is a “78 percent decrease” since April, but I think we should focus on the fact that hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans are still getting vaccinated each day. That’s badass. That means that a lot of people who didn’t rush to get one in April are getting it now—and hey, better late than never. Bet the lines are less daunting, too!

Fully six billion doses of the various vaccines have been poked into people’s arms all across the globe since they’ve become available. Holy crap, isn’t that amazing? The third world—and especially Africa—lags far behind, which is tragic and unjust and should remind us all just how far we have yet to go toward a just world, but I have real optimism that wealthy nations will do the right thing now and start getting vaccines to those places that need it most. We can help with that. Urge our elected officials to start directing supply to poorer nations. I want our most vulnerable to have boosters, our frontline workers and elderly, but I’ll happily set aside a third shot if it can go to Africa instead.

But for now, I just want to enjoy the good news. For all the talk of anti-vaxxers, and all the Very Angry People railing against the vaccine and mask mandates, there are 743,000 doses going out a day in America alone in one of the single largest efforts to save human life the world has ever seen. That’s pretty cool.