I would say "all of the above" except Biden. I don't see how to lay this at his feet. I would also give a 90/10 split to conservative/mainstream media.
Speaking as one of those liberals who would jump straight to the unvaccinated, conservative media and politicians, above all Trump as mostly to blame, the simple fact is you don't get the Delta variant from India into the US without international travel. So you can parse it both ways - if we hard-locked the borders, we wouldn't have Delta (but in that case, the economy would be a wreck). Or if people could just get their sh## together and get vaccinated, we would not have the surge either (but in that case, we'd all have the Bill Gates tracking chip embedded and Apple users would get brain-locked).
At this point there is plenty of vaccine if people would just take it. Madera County stuck at 31% is just insane.
There are many problems, but I think basic statistical illiteracy is a part of this. People don't understand compounding probabilities, by which I mean that many of them (not the hardcore QAnon anti-vaxxers) get that the vaccine reduces risk by, say, 90%. What I don't think they get is that bringing the R-naught down by 90% quickly brings down a surge because .1^1 = .1, but .1^3 = .001, so three-hop infection paths become extremely rare.
Even if the vaccine were 50% effective, it means that my chance of getting infected from a 5th degree contact would be reduced by 1/2^5 = 0.03125. So it reduces my chance that the virus jumps from my friend's electrician's kid's teacher to me by 97%. At 90% effective, it reduces that particular risk by 99.999%.
It's hard for a virus to propagate under either of those conditions. But I think if it were 50%, people would think it wasn't worth it because they would see it as 50/50 for getting the virus.*
*True story - at a friend's house, his new (now ex) girlfriend offered me bottled water and I said I would prefer tap water. She was aghast and said, "You don't have to drink that!" (this was in a place with very good tap water... we're not talking Fresno or Flint). I had just read a report that had tested bottled waters and found you had only a 50% chance that it would be better than your tap water and a 50% chance it would be worse. I told her that and she said, "See, then it's worth it."
That's how well most Americans understand basic probabilities.
