How can we avoid that fate? Wear a seat belt. Only one percent of people wearing a seat belt gets thrown from a car.

Obviously, most people do indeed wear seat belts, about 90% nationwide. The cars beep at them. The cops give them a ticket. And they understand the evidence: The dots are not hard to connect.

Still, 10% of Americans don’t wear a belt, despite the risks.

I started looking into these numbers when I saw a front-page headline about death rates. In my quick glance at the paper, I assumed this was a story about Covid deaths.

No, it was about highway crashes.

But it made me think about Covid and vaccines. As a retired public health person, I am a big fan of getting everyone vaccinated against the Coronavirus, and I volunteered at vaccine clinics. I am frustrated when people don’t get the shots.

There is plenty of evidence that vaccinated people are less likely to get infected, and if they are infected are less likely to transmit virus to others. They are less likely to get really sick, and way, way less likely to get hospitalized and die.

Here’s a report last fall from the Texas state health authorities: “Texans not vaccinated against COVID-19 were about 20 times more likely to suffer a COVID-19-associated death … than people who were fully vaccinated.” Those dots are not hard to connect, either.

Currently, about 75% of Americans over 18 are vaccinated, and if you look at people over 65–long identified as the highest risk age group and the first to be approved for vaccine–the vaccinated percentage is up at 88% nationwide.

Those numbers aren’t wonderful, but let’s face it, this whole thing is brand new. The vaccines were just introduced a year ago.

Seat belts? Congress required the auto industry to install seat belts in 1968, but 30 years later only about two-thirds of occupants used them. All states but New Hampshire now require seat belts, millions of drivers have grown up with that fact of life, and compliance is around 90%.

Seat belt usage has always varied by state. States which let police stop people primarily for a seatbelt violation have the highest usage. Industries requiring employees to get vaccinated have the best rates.

I come away from this data dive less discouraged than when I started. It always takes time for people to adapt to a new public health reality. This is especially true when we are asking people to embrace prevention. You need a combination of evidence, persuasion and compulsion–with penalty.

Seat belts and Vaccines. You can throw in the campaign against smoking, too. The same dynamic applies. In all three cases, there is a perception that personal liberty is being threatened by government action. That has faded–though not disappeared–with seat belts and smoking.

In all these cases, more people are dying than would succumb if everyone buckled up, quit smoking and got the Jab right away. But that’s not the way it works.

It takes time for people to connect that experience with their own personal reality. Some people never do ‘get it.’ It takes even more time – and evidence — for people to appreciate that their own behavior can cause harm to others.

(Peter Slocum lives in the town of Keene.)