I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, March 17th.

As we begin year two of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are at a hopeful but complicated place. So like in the United States,

nearly two-thirds of people over 65 have gotten at least one vaccine dose, according to the New York

Times COVID-tracker. We're vaccinating people at three times the rate of Germany, Italy,

and France, which are all in new lockdowns. Israel is vaccinating people

at three times the rate of the U.S. Research there, reported in the Jerusalem Post, finds the Pfizer

vaccine, the one they use in Israel, is effective against the U.K. variant, but that the variant is still

45% more contagious than the original Wuhan one

and continues to spread fast among the unvaccinated. And researchers are unsure how the vaccines

will do against future mutations. They pointed that out, and that is rarely research.

Back here in the United States,

for all the reporting on vaccine hesitancy among black Americans, an NPR PBS Marist poll

finds a larger percentage of white Americans say they do not plan to get vaccinated than black

Americans, 28% versus 25%. The single biggest group,

broken down by politics and gender, is Republican men. Forty-nine percent of Republican men

said they do not plan to get vaccinated, and around the same number, 47 percent, of the men

who voted for Donald Trump, said they will not.

Now, Trump did just last night make his most direct and public appeal to his supporters to get the shot.

This is obviously a reaction to these recent polls, but there's the data on who's the most vaccine hesitant from the NPR PBS

Maris poll and a CBS news poll found similar trends.

More than 1,200 Americans died from COVID-19 yesterday, according to the New York

Times COVID tracker. That's down by a third from two weeks ago,

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