More People Have Died of COVID This Year Than Last

The good news: the CDC just opened up boosters to everyone over 18.

One simple trick to boost your Thanksgiving dinner, FG Trade/Getty

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In the popular imagination, 2020 gets all the bad press, but this year has been no sunny day at the beach, either. Sure, several effective COVID-19 vaccines emerged, but so did the the highly contagious Delta variant, as well as new, more virulent strains of anti-vax sentiment, tightly yoked to conservative political ideology. Worst of all, intellectual property hoarding has meant that the vaccines have so far largely bypassed low-income nations of the global south, wreaking untold human misery and giving the virus ample opportunity to generate more contagious and/or more virulent strains.

Add it all up and you have a persistent pandemic, one that has just reached yet another grim milestone: As of Nov. 20, the number of US Covid-19 deaths sustained in 2021 has shot past the toll in the unspeakable year of 2020, The Wall Street Journal reports

As hospitalizations tick up yet again and cases surge in Europe, experts worry about impending Thanksgiving travel and closed-door get-togethers. 

One thing Mokdad didn’t mention was that on Nov. 19, the CDC declared “all adults over 18” eligible for a COVID-19 booster dose. You probably can’t convince your Trumpy uncle to get a jab before the holiday. But now you can get a booster. 

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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