Canada Is Beating the United States at Vaccination – By Noah Lanard (Mother Jones) / July 18 2021
America blew its big head start.
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Just a few months ago, the United States was far ahead of Canada in its COVID-19 vaccination rate.
Not anymore. Now, compared to Americans, a greater share of Canadians are fully vaccinated, at 49.1 percent compared to 48.5 percent in the United States. It’s a sharp departure from three months ago when America, with a huge head start thanks to wider availability of vaccines, had a population that was about ten times more likely to be fully vaccinated.
The numbers are even worse for the United States than the latest milestone suggests. Unlike the United States, Canada delayed administering second shots of vaccines so that more people could get first doses more quickly. That meant that Canada had already passed the United States in the share of its population that has received at least one shot of a vaccine. Nearly 80 percent of eligible Canadians have already received a first dose. In the United States, that figure has plateaued around 65 percent.
The results of Canada’s more effective vaccination campaign are likely showing up in infection numbers. Fewer than 1 out of every 100,000 Canadians are testing positive on an average day. That rate is still falling despite the spreading Delta variant that’s contributing to higher infection numbers across the world.
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