The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which millions of Americans rely on for up-to-date information on vaccination rates in their communities, recently acknowledged that its data might overestimate the number of people who have received first doses while underestimating the number who have received booster shots.The acknowledgment was easy to miss, tucked into footnotes at the bottom of the vaccination tracking page on the C.D.C. website. It said that, in light of the possible error, the agency would cap its estimates of vaccination rates at 95 percent. Previously, it had capped its estimates at 99.9 percent and, for example, showed a 99.9 percent national vaccination rate for people 65 and older, which experts said was clearly inaccurate.The C.D.C.’s data on vaccination rates are still considered to be reliable, especially with regard to the number of fully vaccinated Americans, experts say. The main reason for the discrepancies is that state and county data, which the C.D.C. relies on to compile its statistics, does not always properly link the record of people’s booster shots to the records of their initial vaccinations. When the two are not connected, the booster is recorded as though it were a first dose given to a previously unvaccinated person.This can happen when people go to a different location for a booster shot than they did for their original series of injections. That often occurs when people move, or the place they received their first doses doesn’t exist anymore, as is the case with many government-sponsored mass vaccination sites that closed after a few months. Sometimes a different location for a booster is chosen simply because it’s more convenient.Data reported to the C.D.C. is stripped of personal information, which makes it difficult to spot and correct these sorts of errors.“Even with the high-quality data C.D.C. receives from jurisdictions and federal entities, there are limits to how C.D.C. can analyze those data,” the agency said in one of its footnotes. The note added that people receiving boosters at a different location was “just one example of how C.D.C.’s data may overestimate first doses and underestimate booster doses.”A broader reporting challenge is that methodology varies from state to state. Some, for instance, record prisoners in the county where they are incarcerated, while others record them in the county where they lived before. These practices do not always align with how the census counts prisoners — and the C.D.C. uses census counts as its denominators in calculating vaccination rates.Take Crowley County, Colo., as an example. The county is home to a state prison with capacity for nearly 1,900 people. Colorado counts those prisoners at their last legal address, not in Crowley County (unless, of course, they lived in Crowley before they were incarcerated).That means the state calculates the county’s vaccination rate by dividing the number of vaccinations by the number of residents excluding prisoners. But when Colorado reports its data to the C.D.C., the agency divides the number of vaccinations by the census count, which includes prisoners.Given that the county has fewer than 6,000 residents, that change in the denominator makes a huge difference, yielding a vaccination rate of just over 20 percent in the C.D.C. data but close to 50 percent in Colorado’s data.Amy Schoenfeld Walker

The roots of U.S. vaccine mandates predate both the U.S. and vaccines.Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox every weekday.As disease and death reigned around them, some Americans declared that they would never get vaccinated and raged at government efforts to compel them. Anti-vaccination groups spread propaganda about terrible side effects and corrupt doctors. State officials tried to ban mandates, and people made fake vaccination certificates to evade inoculation rules already in place.The years were 1898 to 1903, and the disease was smallpox. News articles and health board reports describe crowds of parents marching to schoolhouses to demand that their unvaccinated children be allowed in, said Michael Willrich, a professor of history at Brandeis University, with some even burning their own arms with nitric acid to mimic the characteristic scar left by the smallpox vaccine.“People went to some pretty extraordinary lengths not to comply,” said Professor Willrich, who wrote “Pox: An American History,” a book about the civil liberties battles prompted by the epidemic.If it all sounds familiar, well, there is nothing new under the sun: not years that feel like centuries, not the wailing and gnashing of teeth over masks, and not vaccine mandates either.As the coronavirus overwhelms hospitals across the South and more than 650,000 Americans — an increasing number of them children — lie dead, the same pattern is emerging. On Thursday, President Biden announced that he would move to require most federal workers and contractors to be vaccinated and, more sweepingly, that all employers with 100 or more employees would have to mandate vaccines or weekly testing. Colleges, businesses and local governments have enacted mandates at a steady pace, and conservative anger has built accordingly.On Monday, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, tweeted that vaccine mandates were “un-American.” In reality, they are a time-honored American tradition.But to be fair, so is public fury over them.“We’re really seeing a lot of echoes of the smallpox era,” said Elena Conis, an associate professor and historian of medicine at the University of California, Berkeley. “Mandates elicit resistance. They always have.”The roots of U.S. vaccine mandates predate both the U.S. and vaccines. The colonies sought to prevent disease outbreaks by quarantining ships from Europe and sometimes, in the case of smallpox, requiring inoculations: a crude and much riskier predecessor to vaccinations in which doctors rubbed live smallpox virus into broken skin to induce a relatively mild infection that would guard against severe infection later. They were a source of enormous fear and anger.In January 1777, George Washington mandated inoculations for the soldiers under his command in the Continental Army, writing that if smallpox were to break out, “we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy.” Notably, it was in large part the soldiers’ desires that overcame his resistance to a mandate.“They were the ones calling for it,” said Andrew Wehrman, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University who studies the politics of medicine in the colonial and revolutionary eras. “There’s no record that I have seen — and I’ve looked — of any soldier turning it down, protesting it.”Buoyed by the success of the mandate, Washington wrote to his brother in June 1777 that he was upset by a Virginia law restricting inoculations. “I would rather move for a Law to compell the Masters of Families to inoculate every Child born within a certain limitted time under severe Penalties,” he wrote.Over the next century, many local governments did exactly that. Professor Wehrman this week tweeted an example of what, in an interview, he said was a “ubiquitous” phenomenon: The health board in Urbana, Ohio, Jordan’s hometown, enacted a requirement in 1867 that in any future epidemic, “the heads of families must see that all the members of their families have been vaccinated.”But by the end of the 1800s, opposition was louder and more widespread. Some states, particularly in the West, introduced laws prohibiting vaccine mandates. Others narrowly passed mandates after intense debate.The reasons for resistance were myriad: Some Americans opposed mandates on the grounds of personal liberty; some because they believed lawmakers were in cahoots with vaccine makers; and some because of safety concerns that were, to be fair, more grounded in reality than the modern equivalent. Vaccines then were not regulated the way they are now, and there were documented cases of doses contaminated with tetanus.The government’s response resembled what, today, are wild conspiracy theories. Contrary to the assertions of some on the far right, the Biden administration has never suggested going door to door to force people to take coronavirus vaccines. But in the 1890s and 1900s, that actually happened: Squads of men would enter people’s homes in the middle of the night, breaking down doors if necessary, to inject people with smallpox vaccines.Legally speaking, the Supreme Court resolved the issue of mandatory vaccinations in 1905, ruling 7-2 in Jacobson v. Massachusetts that they were constitutional.The Constitution “does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint,” Justice John Marshall Harlan, known for defending civil liberties, wrote. “Real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}In the court of public opinion, there was no such resolution.The polio vaccine was less controversial, mainly because it wasn’t initially mandated and because it had been funded by a widely respected nonprofit: the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now called the March of Dimes. This reduced opposition based on mistrust of pharmaceutical companies, and most parents willingly got their children vaccinated. The measles vaccine, too, was not particularly controversial because mandates were not initially enforced.“Nobody was enforcing vaccination, and so it simply didn’t elicit that mistrust,” Professor Conis said. In the smallpox era, by contrast, “skeptical people said, ‘Well, why are we doing this? It just benefits the companies making the vaccine and the doctors administering the vaccine, and why should we trust any of them?’”But the fear and anger came roaring back with the introduction of childhood vaccination mandates in the 1970s. By 1980, all 50 states required schoolchildren to be vaccinated against an array of diseases.None of it is new, but one thing distinguishes today’s anti-vaccination protesters from those of the past. The opposition was always political. It wasn’t always partisan.“There are plenty of echoes today: There are liberty claims, there are strong sentiments about parental rights, there are concerns about the science, there are concerns about the profit involved,” Professor Willrich said. “But this party divide in terms of who is most likely to be hesitant or refuse a vaccine mandate is really, I think, something of our own 21st-century moment.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

What political scientists and pollsters say about how the Covid wave might affect public behavior.There were no open I.C.U. beds on Wednesday in Alabama, or in parts of Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, as hospitals across the South buckled under the weight of a coronavirus surge that could have been mitigated. Cases, hospitalizations and deaths are increasing nationwide. Every day, on average, more than 800 Americans are dying from Covid-19.It is a humanitarian catastrophe, and yet many Americans see it through a political lens. The South has some of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates, driven partly by Republican reluctance. Some governors — including Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who is infected with the coronavirus himself — have forbidden local officials to impose mask requirements. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not changed his approach to follow public health guidelines, has claimed falsely that the surge is a result of President Biden’s border policies.The divisions extend beyond policies to general attitudes about the pandemic: While nearly 60 percent of Americans overall said in a recent Quinnipiac poll that they were concerned about the Delta variant, more than 60 percent of Republicans said they weren’t. And research indicates that many people are looking at Covid policies they don’t like and blaming whichever party they’re not part of.It’s enough to make one despair about the American public’s ability to deal in a nonpartisan manner with, well, anything.But that may not quite be right.I talked to several political scientists and pollsters about how the current Covid wave might affect public opinion and, more important, public behavior. Here’s what they said.The bad news: Partisanship is really hard to overcome.Partisanship — more specifically negative partisanship, which is animosity toward the other party as opposed to, or in addition to, a positive allegiance to your own — is an extraordinarily powerful force in American politics. It has become only stronger in recent years as partisanship has become increasingly intertwined with religious and racial identities.When people look at the pandemic or Afghanistan or any other issue, “you’re doing so through this lens of the identity you have and preserving a self-esteem about that identity,” said Julie Wronski, an associate professor at the University of Mississippi who studies political psychology and behavior. “You’re trying to think about the people who are on ‘my team’: Are they good people? Are they winners? And the people on the other team are ‘bad people’ or ‘losers.’”Some of what we’re seeing now in response to the pandemic was baked in very early on, as soon as elected officials — most prominently President Donald J. Trump — began to politicize basic public health measures, leading people to see support for masks or vaccines as partisan.“That didn’t necessarily have to happen, but once it did, you’re not necessarily talking about the science,” Professor Wronski said. “It’s about who they are and who they consider themselves to be.”One group of researchers had an unusual opportunity to study how partisan identity shaped people’s views on Covid, because in 2019, they surveyed more than 3,300 people about their political predispositions for an unrelated project. Once the pandemic began, they went back to the same people, and about 2,500 responded to follow-up questions.They found, in research published in peer-reviewed journals in August and November 2020, that highly partisan Republicans took their initial cues from leaders like Trump and then stuck to them no matter what — even if Covid cases and deaths surged in their state, even if people around them got sick, said one of the five researchers, Yanna Krupnikov, a professor of political science at Stony Brook University.Another of the five, Samara Klar, an associate professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Government and Public Policy, said the crucial element appeared to be not party affiliation alone, but active animosity toward the opposite side.“We’re seeing the gap mostly among those people who personally dislike the other party, and that’s weird,” Professor Klar said. “It’s weird for your views on a public health crisis to be guided by your personal feelings toward members of the other party, but that is in fact what we’re finding.”The good news: Not everyone is rigidly partisan.Most people aren’t the sort of intense partisans described above. The exact percentage varies depending on the questions you ask, but generally, Professor Krupnikov said, only 25 to 30 percent of people fall into the “hyperpolarized” category.And as the pandemic hit closer to home, she said, less-partisan Republicans “actually started to look very much like Democrats” in their personal precautions and the Covid-related policies they supported.In other words, Democrats tended to take the pandemic seriously from the start, but once case counts spiked in the home counties of Republicans who weren’t extremely partisan, they began to take it seriously, too.This reaffirms a longstanding belief of political science, Professor Klar said: “When an issue becomes really threatening and really important to you, then partisanship weakens its grip on your decision making.”It is, at least, a moderately reassuring thought.“There’s often so much focus on people whose partisanship seems to surpass their care even for their own health, or care for others,” Professor Krupnikov said. “But I do think it’s important to highlight that there are, at least in our data, a lot of people for whom politics was in fact tremendously secondary to the health crisis happening around them.”So what’s next?What this means practically for the future of the pandemic is less clear, especially because we don’t have much reliable polling conducted since the Delta surge spun out of control.The limited polling we do have shows that a majority of Americans are worried about the Delta variant and support the C.D.C. recommendation that people wear masks indoors regardless of their vaccination status — and that pattern holds across regions, including the South, said Mary Snow, a polling analyst at Quinnipiac University. But there are still deep partisan divides in that data.President Biden’s approval rating also seems to have taken some damage, but that may not be because of the surge itself. Rather, it may be “because we were told that we were out of the woods at the beginning of the summer, and that hasn’t happened,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute. “And that’s a reflection of messaging as much as anything else: ‘Why did you tell us you had this under control when you didn’t?’”Ultimately, especially in the face of such a contagious variant, it takes only a small minority of Americans to derail epidemiological progress — and the most partisan Republicans are taking their cues from leaders who have no political incentive to give different ones.In a state like Mississippi, the governor has more to fear politically from a far-right primary challenger than from a Democrat in a general election, Professor Wronski noted.And while even partisans’ opinions could change if people they were close to started dying, she said, it would be a psychologically difficult shift.“For the past couple years, your identity has been built upon a certain perception of what you think Covid is, who you think the good guys are, your lack of trust in political elites,” she said. “And now, if you’re starting to see death at your doorstep, that’s a cognitive dissonance that you have to reconcile.“How many deaths is it going to take? I don’t have that answer.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

Many older, blind and disabled Americans receive benefits from the Supplemental Security Income program. But it has been essentially unchanged since 1972, and its rules mean that many recipients must remain in poverty.When Congress created Supplemental Security Income in 1972, it left no question about its intentions. The program, lawmakers wrote, was “designed to provide a positive assurance that the nation’s aged, blind and disabled people would no longer have to subsist on below-poverty-level incomes.”Today, it helps ensure the opposite.The maximum annual benefit is $9,528, three-quarters of the federal poverty level. Payments decrease if recipients have more than $85 a month in outside income, and are revoked if they exceed $2,000 in savings. There are penalties for accepting groceries or even shelter from loved ones. The result is that it is structurally difficult to be on S.S.I. and not live in poverty.The shift happened over nearly five decades in which Congress made no major changes to the program, which is run by the Social Security Administration and serves about eight million Americans. The outside income limits, for instance, have never been updated for inflation.Now, as Democrats hash out the details of trillions of dollars in spending that they hope to pass through budget reconciliation with no need for Republican support, S.S.I. recipients and advocates see a rare opportunity to overhaul the program.It is far from a guarantee. Just this Wednesday, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, said she would not support the full $3.5 trillion package that top members of her party have proposed — and because her support, and that of Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, is essential, what is cut from the package and what stays in will depend on what the two of them are willing to accept. Whether the S.S.I. proposal is ultimately included in the bill may depend partly on its cost; the Congressional Budget Office has not released an estimate.But “there is a shot,” Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, said in a virtual forum with advocates last week, calling the current state of the S.S.I. program “a national scandal” and urging supporters to call the White House and congressional leaders “every single day.”Mr. Bowman is a sponsor of the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act, which advocates want included in the reconciliation bill. Among other things, it would increase S.S.I. payments to the federal poverty level and index them to inflation; allow more than $500 per month in outside income with no penalty; raise the asset limit to $10,000; and remove penalties for “in-kind support,” like a friend offering shelter.In one sense, the bill is just another example of a measure that stopped being a nonstarter when Democrats took control. But it is also a culmination of years of work by people with disabilities, who have sought to establish themselves as a voting bloc capable of influencing elections and making demands of elected officials.“We were agitating from the inside, but it was outside groups that really got it on the mainstream Democratic agenda,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, who has sponsored S.S.I. legislation for years alongside Representative Raúl Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, and others. “They were less active when it was a Republican Senate and a president like Trump because they knew there wasn’t much at the end of the rainbow.”Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, right, is a sponsor of the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesThe inclusion of the S.S.I. measure in the budget reconciliation bill is by no means a sure thing. There have, however, been tangible signs of momentum.Last month, advocacy groups helped organize what they said was the first bicameral briefing on S.S.I. — essentially a presentation to congressional staff members — in more than 30 years. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont included an S.S.I. overhaul on a draft list of Democratic priorities. Mr. Bowman said that he had spoken with White House officials and that “all signs point to the president being supportive.”The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but President Biden endorsed changes to S.S.I. during his election campaign, a move without which “I don’t think what we’ve seen on the Hill would have been possible,” said Matthew Cortland, a senior fellow at Data for Progress and leader of a campaign called #DemolishDisabledPoverty, of which the S.S.I. push is one part.Other factors may be the pandemic’s outsize impact on disabled and aging Americans and a growing collaboration between advocates for those groups.Rebecca Vallas, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and a leader of #DemolishDisabledPoverty, called the current push “the logical next step of what we saw in 2017 and 2018, when the disability community and the senior community came together to fight in lock step to protect the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.”A Century Foundation/Data for Progress poll in May found bipartisan support for increasing S.S.I. payments to the poverty level (91 percent support among Democrats, 70 percent among Republicans, with a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points).Beyond organizers like Ms. Vallas and Mr. Cortland, himself a former S.S.I. recipient, many current beneficiaries have begun speaking about how the program’s restrictions affect them.Felix Guzman, an S.S.I. recipient with autism and schizoaffective disorder, said higher payments could cover speech therapy or communication devices for his 7-year-old son, who is autistic and nonverbal.“The difference between waiting a month to two months for an item that might help him communicate can make the difference between him meeting a milestone for his disability or not,” Mr. Guzman, 39, said.Other recipients say they can’t pursue meaningful work because it could cost them their S.S.I. and accompanying Medicaid coverage without providing enough income or insurance to compensate. Some want to test their ability to hold a job, but don’t want to risk having nothing to fall back on if they can’t.“It can be very hard to get your S.S.I. or your Medicaid back once you do lose those benefits,” said Mia Ives-Rublee, the director of the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, who uses a wheelchair and relied on S.S.I. in college. “There’s a real trap of having to balance your health needs versus your willingness and ability to work.”The program also discourages marriage for many recipients, because a spouse’s assets — even a few thousand dollars in a retirement account — would count toward the asset limit ($2,000 for individuals and $3,000 for couples).“The amount of benefits that we lose is thousands — it’s not anything that a normal spouse can afford,” said a disabled S.S.I. recipient who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she fears retaliation for speaking against the rules of the program she relies on. “Most of us, myself included, are not getting married because I literally would die. I would lose everything.”Melanie Waldman, 30, who has lupus, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and an amputated arm, receives about $800 a month from Social Security Disability Insurance.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesOnce, that recipient said, she was too sick to leave her home for two months, and because her daily expenses fell, her bank account balance increased to $2,135 from just under $2,000 without her noticing. When the Social Security Administration found out, she had to repay her entire S.S.I. benefit for those months, which took two years.Organizers of #DemolishDisabledPoverty also want Congress to increase funding for home- and community-based services; eliminate a law that lets companies pay some disabled employees far less than minimum wage; and update Social Security Disability Insurance, or S.S.D.I, which is distinct from S.S.I. but has many similar limitations.Melanie Waldman, 30, who has lupus, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and an amputated arm, has been unemployed since leaving a job that was, she said, “wrecking my body.” She receives about $800 a month from S.S.D.I.She has a background in theater and said she wanted to pursue roles, but would have to ask for lower pay. She is allowed $10,000 per year in outside income and, before she was on S.S.D.I., earned about $13,000 from acting. Even though S.S.D.I. pays less, she can’t afford to lose it because that would mean losing health care.Mr. Cortland said the current legislative push focused on S.S.I. because it can be changed through budget reconciliation, whereas S.S.D.I., by law, cannot. But he emphasized at the virtual forum last week that advocates would also work to improve S.S.D.I.The forum, organized by the Century Foundation, included Mr. Bowman and Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, both of whom urged the roughly 17,000 people watching to pressure Congress and the White House.“I know I’m preaching to the choir, and as the granddaughter of a Baptist preacher, there’s a reason why,” Ms. Pressley said. “It’s because I need the choir to sing.”

Despite raging crises, the gears of government seem as stuck as ever, partly because Americans interpret the events “from the framework they started with,” as one political scientist put it.The sirens have gotten pretty hard to ignore.Wildfires are raging across the Western United States and Canada, spreading smoke so widely that the sun turned red and people’s eyes and throats stung as far east as New York. One of the fires is so large that it’s generating its own weather. The West has been suffering through its fourth heat wave in less than two months. Coronavirus case numbers are rising again nationally, mostly among unvaccinated people, and states like Florida and Missouri are experiencing devastating and deadly surges.But, despite the raging crises, the gears of American government seem as stuck as ever — partly because of the intensity of Americans’ polarization, and partly because Republican members of Congress have remained opposed even to some measures that polls show bipartisan majorities of voters support, like stricter limits on power plant and vehicle emissions.Significant action on climate change is imaginable only through executive action by President Biden and a party-line budget reconciliation bill, as Coral Davenport, a climate reporter for The Times, told me this month, and even such measures may not be ambitious enough to meet the nation’s climate goals.Many millions of Republicans are still declining to get coronavirus vaccines, and condemning the Biden administration’s vaccination push. They have done so even as vivid accounts from medical workers in the hardest-hit states make clear how terrible a toll the Delta variant is taking on unvaccinated people.The trouble is that, in a polarized era, “political elites have every incentive to politicize these things early on, and so people who are paying attention to politics pick up on the frame elected officials and the media are using,” said Jaime E. Settle, an associate professor of government and director of the Social Networks and Political Psychology Lab at the College of William & Mary.Even catastrophic and highly visible events like the wildfires and the heat waves don’t necessarily move the needle, because “what happens is that people interpret these events from the framework they started with,” Settle said. So if a person starts out disbelieving the established science of human-driven climate change, they are likely to look at the recent evidence of climate change “and say, ‘Well, that’s not evidence’ or, ‘It is evidence but humans are not to blame for it.’”Joanne Freeman, a professor of history and American studies at Yale who studies political polarization and political violence, said today’s environment felt reminiscent of previous eras of extreme division, including the 1790s, the 1850s and the 1960s.“Something those periods share is when things are that polarized, there’s a lack of trust in pretty much anything — a lack of trust in information, a lack of trust of each side in the other, a lack of trust in national institutions and their ability to handle things,” Freeman said. “Even though these things are happening right in front of us, so many people are distrustful of the information they get. You can’t get past that fundamental distrust to get to facts or even to get to things of extreme urgency.”She added, “If you don’t trust lawmakers and you don’t trust the press and you don’t trust people in positions of authority outside of the little sphere in which they’re acting, how in the world can you pull people together to address something bigger?”As my colleague Alex Burns wrote this month, seismic events that would almost certainly have changed American politics in past eras are simply not making a dent now. We may soon find out “whether the American electorate is still capable of large-scale shifts in opinion.”As for the possibility of changing a person’s views — or acceptance of facts — through personal conversations, Settle said the challenge is that we tend to base our arguments on what would change our minds, not on what would change someone else’s. And we don’t even have good forums in which to have these conversations.“There’s a small but growing body of research on how you might be able to set up online interactions to make them better,” she said, “but the kind of organic options we currently have on social media and comment threads are just a disaster.”New York Times EventsClimate Hub: Ideas with the power to change the futureAs world leaders gather for consequential climate change negotiations, join us at The New York Times Climate Hub in Glasgow for nine days of live journalism and ideas to inspire action, in person and online.Understand the science; learn about the challenges and innovations; engage with live talks, debates and exhibitions; and find out how you can create real change.Be the first to find out about speakers, tickets and programming by visiting our Climate Hub page.On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.

The conflict among chiropractors has become more consequential as the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads and the rate of new vaccinations slows.Anyone who listened to the Idaho chiropractor Steven Baker’s podcast in May would have heard a cornucopia of misinformation about the coronavirus and the vaccines protecting hundreds of millions of people against it.In an episode titled “Are the ‘Vaccinated’ People Dangerous?” (they aren’t), he claimed that scientists had never identified the whole virus (they have), that the vaccines turned people into “modern-day zombies” who spewed spike proteins in every breath and body fluid (they don’t), and that vaccinated people could disrupt the menstrual cycles of women around them (they can’t).So, Dr. Baker said, he had a new policy: If any patients made “what I would consider a horribly poor decision to go get this shot,” he would not allow them inside his office for 30 days.Dr. Baker, who didn’t respond to a request for comment, doesn’t represent all chiropractors, many of whom support vaccinations. But he is among a vocal cadre who have promoted doubts about the coronavirus vaccines online and in their clinics and, in the process, exposed a longstanding split within the profession.On one side are people like him, who dismiss the overwhelming medical consensus that the vaccines are effective and safe. These chiropractors closely follow the ideas espoused more than a century ago by the profession’s founder, Daniel David Palmer, who rejected germ theory and believed that diseases were caused by spinal misalignments called subluxations that disrupted an innate life force.The chiropractic profession, which involves adjustment of the spine through manual manipulation and is sometimes just called chiropractic, “emerged from this vitalistic, almost supernatural idea of healing,” said Timothy Caulfield, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta. “It’s difficult for them to escape their roots, and I think that’s one of the reasons that so many people continue to be attracted to chiropractic who are more likely to be vaccination hesitant, and why so many chiropractic practitioners are in fact vaccination hesitant.”An athlete massaged by a chiropractor after a training session.Kim Kyung-Hoon/ReutersOn the other side are chiropractors who have called on their peers to encourage vaccination as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical authorities. In a 2013 paper in the Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association, for example, four chiropractors wrote that by recommending vaccines “as clinically indicated, the chiropractic profession would promote the public good and, by doing so, would be in a better position to be embraced by the broader health care community.”That paper, said one of its authors, Brian Gleberzon, a professor at Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College, “is still relevant.”As the Delta variant of the coronavirus spreads and the rate of new vaccinations slows, the conflict within the profession has become more consequential. The United States is administering about 530,000 doses per day on average — compared with a peak of more than three million in April — and while case numbers are low nationally, they are spiking in states like Missouri and Arkansas, where vaccination rates are lagging.Many fields of alternative medicine are home to anti-vaccination sentiment, but chiropractic is one of the most popular of those fields, and its tensions are more in the open. More than 35 million Americans visit a chiropractor each year, according to the American Chiropractic Association. And even though chiropractors aren’t required to receive specialized training in infectious diseases — they must attend chiropractic school, not medical school — many patients look to them for medical advice.Professor Caulfield’s research has found that people who are attracted to alternative therapies like chiropractic are “also the people who are likely to be susceptible to misinformation,” he said. “If you’re open to alternative medicine, you’re also more likely to be attracted to anti-vaccination rhetoric, so the ideas cluster.”Annette Bernat, a spokeswoman for the American Chiropractic Association, said the group encouraged members to follow C.D.C. guidance on Covid-19 prevention and supported “evidence-informed care and generally accepted best practices based on current, high-quality research,” but had no stance on vaccines.But several state organizations said it could be appropriate for chiropractors to weigh in on vaccinations or other medical issues outside their scope of practice.The Arizona Association of Chiropractic — one of 11 reached for this article — said individual chiropractors were free “to make their own decision with regard to the efficacy of vaccinations.”Speaking for himself and not on behalf of the organization, James Bogash, a board member, argued that vaccination should be an individual choice based on risk tolerance and said scientists could not yet know the vaccines’ long-term effects.Mr. Bogash also expressed frustration “that prior Covid infection is completely not part of the discussion, despite every evidence to support the fact that natural immunity is stronger and longer lasting than acquired immunity.” (Research indicates that the vaccines are likely to create stronger and more reliable immunity, particularly against variants.)Without mentioning vaccines, Dawn Benton, executive vice president of the California Chiropractic Association, said chiropractors were “well trained in the recognition of conditions that are outside of our scope so that we can determine when a patient is best treated in our office or by another health care professional.”“Given our training,” she said, “there are times when a doctor of chiropractic can appropriately comment on many medical topics, and we leave the decision on that up to each individual doctor of chiropractic and the regulations they practice under.”Only two of the 11 organizations reached — the Delaware Chiropractic Society and the Washington State Chiropractic Association — said directly that chiropractors should refer patients to medical doctors for questions on medical subjects.“Providing clinical advice on out-of-scope topics would violate numerous statutes and regulations governing health care licensees,” said Jeff Curwen, the executive director of the Washington association. “Chiropractors can and should discuss with their patients how nonchiropractic treatments may affect their chiropractic care, but they should always refer those patients to the appropriate provider type for specific answers to out-of-scope questions.”Some practitioners, though, have shared inaccurate or unsourced information without prompting.On his website, Greg Werner, a chiropractor in New York City and Westchester County, N.Y., claims that there is no proof vaccines work and that germ theory “doesn’t exist” because “if it did EVERYONE would be sick ALL the time.” (He declined an interview request.)A New Jersey chiropractor, J. Zimmerman, has routinely cited figures on his blog from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System — a federal database to which anyone can report health problems after vaccination — and suggested that vaccines caused the problems reported. He did not mention the C.D.C.’s disclaimer — “A report to VAERS does not mean that the vaccine caused the adverse event, only that the adverse event occurred some time after vaccination” — in his posts until after The New York Times emailed him questions about his use of VAERS.Dr. Zimmerman did not answer those questions.Sean B. Carroll, vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a professor of biology at the University of Maryland, wrote in Scientific American in November that the chiropractic arguments against vaccines reminded him of arguments against evolution.He identified six tactics, the first five being “doubt the science,” “question scientists’ motives and integrity,” “magnify disagreements among scientists and cite gadflies as authorities,” “exaggerate potential harm” and “appeal to personal freedom.”People challenged on one front, he said, typically shift to another. And if all else fails, he said, they turn to the sixth: “Reject whatever would repudiate a key philosophy.” It is because of this pattern that pro-vaccine chiropractors’ voices are essential, Dr. Carroll said: Just as he cannot persuade creationists to accept evolution but clergy members sometimes can, chiropractors may be able to persuade their colleagues to accept vaccines where scientists can’t.“Outsiders are suspect, and they’re pretty much disregarded on the face of things,” he said. “Always the best way is that somebody from the in-group, or some group from the in-group, says, ‘We think differently.’”

In recent weeks, people who oppose Covid vaccinations have spread a claim that is not only false but defies the rules of biology: that being near someone who has received a vaccine can disrupt a woman’s menstrual cycle or cause a miscarriage.The idea, promoted on social media by accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, is that vaccinated people might shed vaccine material, affecting people around them as though it were secondhand smoke. This month, a private school in Florida told employees that if they got vaccinated, they could not interact with students because “we have at least three women with menstrual cycles impacted after having spent time with a vaccinated person.”In reality, it is impossible to experience any effects from being near a vaccinated person, because none of the vaccine ingredients are capable of leaving the body they were injected into.The vaccines currently authorized for use in the United States instruct your cells to make a version of the spike protein found on the coronavirus, so your immune system can learn to recognize it. Different vaccines use different vehicles to deliver the instructions — for Moderna and Pfizer, messenger RNA, or mRNA; for Johnson & Johnson, an adenovirus genetically modified to be inactive and harmless — but the instructions are similar.“It’s not like it’s a piece of the virus or it does things that the virus does — it’s just a protein that’s the same shape,” said Emily Martin, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “Transferring anything from the vaccine from one person to another is not possible. It’s just not biologically possible.”Microorganisms spread from person to person by replicating. The vaccine ingredients and the protein can’t replicate, which means they can’t spread. They don’t even spread through your own body, much less to anybody else’s.“They’re injected into your arm, and that’s where they stay,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins, said of the vaccines. “mRNA is taken up by your muscle cells near the site of injection, the cells use it to make that protein, the immune system learns about the spike protein and gets rid of those cells. It’s not something that circulates.”It’s also not something that sticks around. Messenger RNA is extremely fragile, which is one reason we’ve never had an mRNA-based vaccine before: It took a long time for scientists to figure out how to keep it intact for even the brief period needed to deliver its instructions. It disintegrates within a couple days of vaccination.Vaccinated people can’t shed anything because “there’s nothing to be shedding,” said Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious disease specialist at Bellevue Hospital Center and a member of President Biden’s transition advisory team on the coronavirus. “The people who shed virus are people who have Covid. So if you want to prevent yourself or others from shedding virus, the best way to do that is to get vaccinated so you don’t get Covid.”This brings us to the reports of women having abnormal periods after being near vaccinated people. Because one person’s vaccine can’t affect anybody else, it is impossible for these two events to be connected. Many things, like stress and infections, can disrupt menstrual cycles.The shedding claims are “a conspiracy that has been created to weaken trust in a series of vaccines that have been demonstrated in clinical trials to be safe and effective,” Dr. Christopher M. Zahn, vice president of practice activities at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement. “Such conspiracies and false narratives are dangerous and have nothing to do with science.”Some women have expressed a related concern that getting vaccinated themselves could affect their menstrual cycles. Unlike secondhand effects, this is theoretically possible, and research is ongoing — but anecdotal reports could be explained by other factors, and no study has found a connection between the vaccine and menstrual changes.“There’s no evidence that the vaccine affects your menstrual cycle in any way,” Dr. Gounder said. “That’s like saying just because I got vaccinated today, we’re going to have a full moon tonight.”