In the race to vaccinate their populations, Israel and the United Arab Emirates are leaving the rest of the world in the dust. The Republic of Seychelles, a small island group in the Indian Ocean, is also an unheralded leader in the effort. One thing these nations have in common is that they are all small. They are reasonably wealthy, too, but wealth alone does not correlate with vaccination rates, as the dismal efforts in the European Union and Canada show.

The United States is vaccinating its people at a higher rate than any nation its size, but looking at the numbers broken down by state, we see a similar pattern. The most recent data show that the state with the highest vaccination rate is Alaska, followed by New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Connecticut. These states are scattered across the country and the political axis. Some of them are rich and others are poor. What they have in common is that their populations are all smaller than that of the average state.