Hurray! All US Adults Are Now Eligible for the COVID Vaccine

The Biden admin meets a critical deadline.

Stefani Reynolds/ZUMA

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All adults ages 16 and up in the United States are now eligible to receive the COVID vaccine, meeting the April 19 deadline set by President Biden last month. That critical milestone comes as the White House announced on Sunday that half of all US adults—about 128 million people—have received at least one dose of the vaccine, yet another stat that captures how quickly the rate of vaccinations in the US has ramped up in recent weeks. That pace is particularly striking when compared internationally; earlier this month, CNN reported that the US was vaccinating people at five times the global average.

But significant challenges persist. Vaccines are going unused in large pockets across the country, particularly in regions with strong evangelical communities. Almost half of Republicans, according to a poll released last week, say they will decline to receive the vaccine if possible. As I wrote last week, all this resistance poses a real threat to the US ever achieving herd immunity as highly contagious COVID variants continue to spread.

Still, the expansion of vaccine eligibility today is a real success for the Biden administration. To anyone 16 and over who had been waiting to get the jab, get out there!

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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