> Had the US continued to vaccinate in the summer at the same rate as in the spring, the US would be near herd immunity by now.

This obsession in the media with herd immunity is strange. It's not even clear herd immunity with Delta and our current vaccines is attainable. Just look at Iceland where 65+% of cases are fully vaccinated (https://www.covid.is/data). UK has had high vaccination rates and is still surging (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/).

We can certainly make the pandemic manageable - I'm not worried about hospitals toppling over in the Bay Area with its 80+% 12+ fully vaccinated rate, but covid is still on the upswing.

> People think that either (a) COVID itself is a hoax or not that bad, or (b) that the vaccines are a hoax

Granted this is the Bay Area I'm in but the folks I know that refuse to take a vaccine don't see it as a hoax. They are some combination of unconvinced of a low risk of long-term vaccine side-effects (by virtue of us having no actual long-term observations) and concluding P(risk_of_getting_covid) * expected_cost(covid | infected) < expected_cost(side_effects)

For some other analysis that this is more than just politics:

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/31/whos-agai...

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/07/27/americas-...

You have to admit that those unconvinced people doing that equation are unbelievably selfish, as they are certainly not including the cost of spreading COVID to an immunocompromised person in that last term.

The question being asked is "would you take a vaccine to save a neighbor's life?" and these people are answering no.

There was an effort to convince people not to vaccinate, but I think the bigger cause of anti-vaccination sentiment was contrarianism against and distrust of the effort to convince people to vaccinate. Years of government and media lies ranging from the Iraq War to distorted and propagandistic reporting of things that Trump had said resulted in millions of people justifiably feeling that the mainstream media, the government establishment, and the supposed "experts" that the media and government often trot out are all to be distrusted. It is a boy who cried wolf scenario.