Ohio’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign has hit a new lull after two months of record low numbers of residents getting vaccinated.
The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
While COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are significantly down from the winter surge, vaccination is still key for the present and future. It provides powerful, direct protection to the recipient. It also, when enough people in a community are vaccinated, provides indirect protection for those who aren’t vaccinated or have weaker immune systems.
Like other frontiers of the pandemic, vaccination became mired in partisan politics with real human consequences. On average, former President Donald Trump won 53% of the vote share statewide in the 2020 elections. But in Ohio counties that are less than 50% vaccinated, Trump won on average 74% of the votes.
Ohio schools require vaccination as a term of enrollment against a broad spectrum of infectious diseases like measles and chicken pox, yielding immunization coverage between about 75% to 95% depending on the disease.