America has hit a roadblock in the coronavirus pandemic.
A hard, very dangerous and completely unnecessary roadblock.
Put bluntly, a lot of deluded, ill-informed, shamefully scare-mongered, or simply complacent Americans have got it into their heads that either the covid vaccines are somehow more dangerous than covid itself, or the virus isn't serious enough to warrant protection from it.
Many more, tens of millions of people across the United States, are hesitant to get jabbed for all manner of other reasons ranging from doubts about the vaccine's efficacy, to a fear they impair fertility, damage pregnancy, alter DNA, magnetize you, or even actively help transmit the virus.
These unsubstantiated theories have been fuelled by anti-vaxxer whack-jobs online, and especially on social media.
And they have sadly begun to have a very real and deadly influence, as I can personally attest.
A lot of deluded, ill-informed, shamefully scare-mongered, or simply complacent Americans have got it into their heads that either the covid vaccines are somehow more dangerous than covid itself, or the virus isn't serious enough to warrant protection from it
Fewer than one in ten Americans who reject the vaccines trust the nation's top infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci, and only 20% trust the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC). This is largely down to a lengthy concerted effort by many anti-vaxxers on social media, and some in the mainstream media, to denigrate both Fauci and the CDC
I've just had covid, the Delta variant, despite being fully vaccinated with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine.
It was an unpleasant experience and I felt quite sick, as sick as I've felt from any illness, but I never came close to being hospitalized or dying.
So, the vaccine worked: it stopped me getting seriously ill.
But when I revealed this on Twitter and Instagram, and urged people to get jabbed, I was promptly bombarded with an astonishing amount of utterly insane and incredibly vitriolic responses from the anti-vaxxer brigade – many of them in America.
They accused me of being paid by the UK government to say this, or of being paid by the vaccine companies, or by Bill Gates to help him in his evil masterplan to stick his own 5g chips in our brains.
They didn't believe I'd had covid, or if I did, then it proved the vaccines don't work.
They screamed abuse at me for encouraging people to get the vaccines, many branding me 'Mengele' after Josef Mengele, the evil Nazi 'Angel of Death' scientist who helped create the Holocaust gas chambers and performed deadly experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
I'm used to being trolled, but this was on a different scale to anything I've experienced.
A few even threatened me with physical violence if I didn't 'shut the f*ck up' with my 'pro-vaxx propaganda.'
The venom and volume of the reaction said all I needed to know about why US vaccination rates are stalling.
And America's growing hesitancy to get jabbed is now directly threatening the country's ability to defeat covid.
Back in mid-April, the US was vaccinating more than three million people a day in one of the fastest, best vaccine distribution programs in the world.
Now, that figure is down to just 500,000 a day.
Yet new covid cases have doubled in the past month and every single state is seeing an increase, some in the south very sharp increases, as the Delta variant begins to run riot as it has been in the UK and many other parts of the world.
President Biden, who missed his target of getting 70% of over-18s vaccinated with at least one shot by July 4 (it's still only 68%), has blamed firms like Facebook for 'killing people' by allowing covid misinformation to take hold on their platforms.
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