November 20, 2021

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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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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