Last month, a tragic national milestone was passed: Over 1 million Americans have died of COVID-19.

That’s the highest death toll in the world.

It didn’t have to be that way. When people do get sick, we have the most up-to-date health care system in existence. And in order to prevent them getting sick, or at least dramatically decrease the dangers of dying or becoming severely ill, American pharmaceutical companies were the first to develop the best vaccines against the disease.

But conspiracy theorists convinced too many Americans that the extremely safe vaccines are dangerous, and on the order of 300,000 of us died as a result.

The United States would be a long way off from that million-dead milestone absent the braying of these perverse voices who for reasons of their own — sometimes involving maintaining a lucrative social-media following — push hypotheses with no basis in fact on a gullible public.

Lots of small countries around the globe have a 90%-plus fully vaccinated population. In the developed world, Chile is at 93%; Portugal 86%; Australia 85%; neighboring Canada at 84%.

In fact, lots of larger less-developed countries are also in the 80s: Vietnam, Malaysia, Brazil.

The United States of America? We’re at 67%.

It’s more than a little jarring, that number. It’s tragic. The vaccine-skepticism, fueled by malign forces who wish to separate us from reason to cause chaos, is also a kind of disease.

Two years and two months ago, when Americans and the rest of the world were just beginning to come to grips with the reality that a deadly viral pandemic was sweeping through the population, can you imagine being told that by 2022 over a million of our people would die from it?

One problem with such big numbers is that they are hard to fathom. It’s as if all the residents of a city with a population as large as San Jose, California had vanished in two years. That’s almost incomprehensible.

And yet it’s true.

After heart disease and cancer, COVID is the third leading cause of death in this country.

There are no vaccinations against heart disease and cancer. There is against COVID. Even when the vaccinated still contract the disease, the vaccines dramatically reduce severe symptoms and rates of death.

COVID is the cause of the biggest drop in life expectancy for Americans since World War II, and yet your Aunt Sadie, the Facebook maven, will still tell you that it doesn’t exist.

We know that at this point even non-conspiracy minded, warmhearted people — vaccinated people — are just plain worn out by COVID-19: By the fact of it, and the horrible deaths it causes; by the loss of friends and loved ones and so many complete strangers, too; by the restrictions the effort to contain it placed on our lives and our livelihoods.

But everyone who understands human nature knows that a culture that declines to mourn its dead cannot successfully survive.

Americans need to turn away from the divides the disease has cleaved in us and face up to some realities in order to move ahead. We need to acknowledge and lament the deaths and to cherish and celebrate the memories of those we have lost. While it’s exhausting to do so, we need to understand that COVID variants will come and go for some time into the future. And we need to calmly, patiently, lovingly engage still-skeptical Americans with the good news that, as it has with previous medical crises, modern medicine, not spinners of seditious schemes, will see us through — with our help.