Editorial: 95% vaccinated number seems absurdly high

It is hard to get 95% of Pennsylvanians to walk in step for anything.

Pennsylvania is a perennial swing state because it is a state divided on almost everything. Steelers versus Eagles. Pitt versus Penn State. Sheetz versus Wawa.

And there is no deeper divide than the political. It isn’t just about Democrat versus Republican, although it’s easy to draw the map in shades of blue and red. There also are the very different needs and feelings of rural areas as opposed to cities.

In short, Pennsylvanians come to a 95% agreement on almost nothing, except maybe dislike of potholes and turnpike tolls.

Because of that, it makes it hard to accept that 95% of adults in Pennsylvania have received at least one dose of the covid-19 vaccines. Nonetheless, that is what Gov. Tom Wolf touted last week.

“The uplifting reality is that most people are doing what they can to protect their health,” Wolf said.

But those numbers are hard to swallow.

The pandemic, its restrictions and the vaccine have become highly polarizing. Acceptance of the vaccine or concessions to mask-wearing have been seen as very Democratic, while resisting them on grounds of personal freedom has been a Republican stance.

Pennsylvania’s population is just shy of 13 million people, with 79.6% of them over 18. That means Wolf and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want people to believe more than 9.8 million Pennsylvanians who agree on almost nothing all accepted the vaccine.

We are supposed to accept this despite the fact the state and CDC have had noted problems with compiling data — and that the numbers that are supposed to be “state” numbers don’t include data from Pennsylvania’s largest city because Philadelphia runs its own vaccine program separate from the state Department of Health.

Pennsylvania has had repeated data collection and release issues during the pandemic, from the number of positive cases to huge data dumps when lab information has been reported months late. Nationally, the CDC data has seemed at odds with information from polling and individual states’ numbers.

This is frustrating because, for almost two years, people have been encouraged, cajoled and outright begged to accept the data. Bad numbers make that hard.

What makes it harder is that state officials are standing strong by the absurdly high statistic. They are doing that after well-publicized math problems in Harrisburg in recent years, not the least of which are the recent Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System accounting error and miscalculating the repayment of unemployment for many people for years.

It would be great if Pennsylvanians could agree on anything to a 95% degree. Paper versus plastic. Chocolate versus vanilla. Primanti’s sandwiches versus cheesesteaks. But they don’t, the state knows they don’t, and not putting a caveat on this number as they celebrate it seems less positive than it does cavalier.