Those who are refusing to get vaccinated are setting the U.S. up for an even more divided future, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned on Tuesday.
Speaking with Don Lemon on CNN, Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Biden’s chief medical advisor—was asked to give his thoughts on whether vaccinated parents can have confidence that their children are safe in light of recent Delta variant developments.
While statistics show that an elderly person and/or someone with an underlying disease remains more likely to get seriously ill, Fauci has noticed recently that “more and more younger people” are getting infected, some of them with serious illness.
“If your children aren’t old enough to get vaccinated, they should be wearing a mask,” Fauci advised.
Later, Fauci said whether or not pandemic safety measures should be wholly lifted “depends on where you are.” As Fauci detailed, those who unfortunately reside in a region that’s lagging behind in vaccinations should “be careful” about abandoning mandates.
Speaking more generally about the fact that the U.S. will not be meeting Biden’s July 4 vaccination goal, Fauci again reminded the public that worries of fresh outbreaks are indeed a wholly preventable facet of the pandemic era. However, multiple states—Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Wyoming, and others—are still reporting dramatically low vaccination rates.
“That is something that we are very concerned about,” Fauci said Tuesday. “When you have such a low level of vaccination superimposed upon a variant that has a high degree of efficiency of spread, what you are gonna see among under-vaccinated regions—be they states, cities, or counties—you’re gonna see these individual types of blips. It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas.”
Put another way, please—unless you’ve wisely already done so—get a vaccine.
“You’re gonna have areas where the vaccine rate is high, where there’s more than 70 percent of the population that has received at least one dose,” Fauci said. “When you compare that with areas where you may have 35 percent of the people vaccinated, you clearly have a high risk of seeing these spikes in those selected areas. The thing that’s frustrating about this, Don, is that this is entirely avoidable [and] entirely preventable.”
Fauci’s comments, again per CNN, pair well with Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s recent warning that those who are still not vaccinated are indeed at high risk of infection from the Delta variant.
According to the most recent CDC data, a little more than 154 million people in the U.S. have now been fully vaccinated.
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