Beating COVID-19 tougher than hoped

By Mark Pattison
Catholic News Service
WASHINGTON — The year is ending pretty much the same way it started, with the United States wondering whether it will experience a surge in COVID-19 cases when the calendar changes numbers.
A year ago, the urge to gather with family and friends at Christmas went hand in hand with a big spike in coronavirus infections. This time, families are likely to come together once more, but now in the shadow of the recently discovered omicron variant. Early indications say the variant seems to cause mild symptoms but is more transmissible, although not enough is yet known as to how much damage it can do.
Vaccines, which were approved on an emergency basis in the latter part of 2020, became widely available in 2021, first to the most vulnerable demographics, then to the general population. By spring, the vaccines were OK'd for use by middle and high schoolers, and by fall they had been approved for use for children as young as age five.
That doesn't mean, though, that everyone got in a line with their sleeves rolled up for an injection. Despite a famous photo of Pope Francis getting a jab, millions of Americans have refused to be vaccinated.
Some have cited religious reasons related to how the vaccines were developed.
In the U.S., the three currently being administered are the Pfizer and Moderna two-shot vaccines and the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines did not use abortion-derived cell lines in developing or producing their vaccines, but they did in lab testing. The one-shot Johnson & Johnson used abortion-derived cell lines in testing and producing its vaccine.
The Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a statement last December, saying: "All vaccinations recognized as clinically safe and effective can be used in good conscience with the certain knowledge that the use of such vaccines does not constitute formal cooperation with the abortion from which the cells used in production of the vaccines derive."
The doctrinal congregation added, "It should be emphasized, however, that the morally licit use of these types of vaccines, in the particular conditions that make it so, does not in itself constitute a legitimation, even indirect, of the practice of abortion, and necessarily assumes the opposition to this practice by those who make use of these vaccines."
Politics may be another reason some Americans aren't getting inoculated. A Sept. 28 report from the Kaiser Family Foundation said 90% of Democrats had been vaccinated, compared with 68% of Independents and just 58% of Republicans.
There are still others who do not oppose the vaccine itself, but do oppose being forced to get it, like under mandates the Biden administration has imposed on the nation's health care workers and on companies with 100 or more employees.
Biden's mandates were to go into effect Dec. 3 for health care workers and Jan. 4 for businesses, but by early December a number of federal courts put them on hold for now.
Several city and state governments have instituted vaccine mandates of their own for health care workers, police, firefighters and all other first responders. 
The holidays weren't the only cause for spikes in COVID cases in 2021. As warmer weather spread throughout most of the country, people seemed to be more optimistic that COVID had been successfully beaten back. But by late July, the delta variant had become the predominant strain of coronavirus in the United States, and death rates exceeded the 2,000-a-day mark — equal to what it had been early in '21 — despite the widespread availability of vaccines.
As the 2021 calendar turned to December, there had been more than 48 million cases of COVID diagnosed in the United States — that's one for every seven people in the nation — with 780,000 deaths, with the daily death toll just under 1,000, despite vaccination levels. Worldwide, there have been 262 million cases confirmed and more than 5.2 million deaths.
A total of 8.02 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, just a bit better than one for each person. In the United States, 468.23 million doses have been given, close to one-and-a-half doses per person.