PRESIDENT Joe Biden is considering making vaccines mandatory nationwide, the head of the CDC revealed on Friday.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky confirmed that with stalling vaccination rates in the US, the Biden administration was “looking into” whether or not to force Americans to get their Covid-19 jab.
“Are you for mandating a vaccine on a federal level?” Fox News anchor Baier asked her during an interview on his show “Special Report.”
“That’s something that I think the administration is looking into. It’s something that I think we are looking to see approval of from the vaccine,” Walensky said.
“Overall, I think in general, I am all for more vaccination.
“But, I have nothing further to say on that except that we are looking into those policies.”
‘HETEROGENOUS COUNTRY’
She was then asked about what she can tell the population of Americans who refuse to get vaccinated for personal or religious reasons.
“I completely understand the pushback,” she said. “I also understand that this is not unlike other… vaccines that are mandated for school going children” – citing the standardization of polio, pertussis and other shots.
She also discussed how as a healthcare professional herself while serving as the former chief epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital she was “mandated every year to get a flu vaccine” to maintain her job.
She chalked up the hesitancy to get jabbed by so many Americans to the fact that the US is a “heterogeneous country.”
RE-MESSAGING MISSION
“Some people haven’t had access,” she said, before ticking off a variety of factors beyond naysayers.
“Some people haven’t had time off.
“Some people don’t understand its benefits. Some people are worried about the side effects.
“So I think as we go and try and provide information to people who are not yet vaccinated,” she said.
Much of that will fall on messaging.
The CDC is already grappling with the daunting task that the disease, and especially the Delta variant, is spreading fast or even faster than Ebola, chicken pox or the common cold.
A slide presentation shared within the CDC has already forced the hand of the nation’s top public health authority to modify its messaging as the raging Delta mutation spreads – sending cases and hospitalizations soaring.
The slide suggested that there needed to be a paradigm shift.
The researchers who furnished the presentation for the CDC determined in the most prominent health agency and its partners need to “acknowledge the war has changed.”
‘PROBABLY’ MORE RESTRICTIONS
As President Joe Biden left the White House for a weekend at Camp David, he spoke about more stringent measures to be implemented to prevent Covid-19 spread.
“In all probability,” he said.
The short response comes after some federal agencies as well as states and local municipalities add to their Covid-19 prevention toolkits, including reimposing mask mandates that were originally lifted months ago.
President Joe Biden is already calling on states to allocate money from his American Rescue Plan to gift $100 payments to people who have yet to receive their vaccinations
“Unvaccinated people should get vaccinated and continue masking,” the CDC stated on its website.
It also “recommends that fully vaccinated people wear masks in public indoor settings in areas of substantial or high transmission.”
Biden’s comment comes one day after he was reminded by a Fox News reporter that he once preached vaccinated Americans could go mask-free.
The president disagreed: “No I didn’t say that. I said if you’re fully vaccinated in an area where you do not have – well let me clarify that.”
The reporter told Biden: “In May, you made it sound like a vaccine was the ticket to losing the masks forever.”
Biden tried to explain: “That was true at the time” and then added, “A new variant came along, they didn’t get vaccinated, it spread more rapidly and more people were getting sick.
“That’s the difference.”
GET JABBED
Biden was initially pleased because he suggested that Wednesday was a day of “good news” because “almost a million people got vaccinated, about half a million people for the first time.”
The Biden administration is making getting immunized with the Covid-19 jab a must for the two million employees of the federal government or face routine Covid-19 testing.
Other private industries in the sectors of big tech, health care and retail are also pushing vaccine ultimatums on their workers.
The CDC acknowledged that the update in mask policy comes while “very effective” the Covid-19 vaccine and other vaccines aren’t perfect.
“In some instances, fully vaccinated people will get Covid-19 and may be contagious,” the CDC’s website states. “These are called “vaccine breakthrough cases.”
The agency cited the new findings that prove the Delta mutation “can lead to breakthrough infections.”
It then cautioned: “This means that while vaccinated people are much less likely to get sick, it will still happen in some cases.”
So even as more people get jabbed, the CDC stressed that the “number of breakthrough cases is also expected to increase, even as the vaccines remain highly effective.”
The numbers are worrying health officials.
This week the daily average of confirmed Covid-19 cases was 66,606 – leaping from 40,597 a week before, according to the CDC.
That’s an increase of nearly 65 percent.
As for fully immunized Americans, the total is 163,868,916.
That accounts for roughly half the estimated 328,239,523 people living in the US.
The CDC’s Walensky warned that the more complacent Americans are with vaccinations, the higher the likelihood the virus will prevail by mutating and surviving.
“The virus is smart. The virus is out to make sure it can survive,” she said.
And it’s an opportunist that will go where we are not vaccinated.
“The more the virus is mutating the more it has an app to mutate away from our vaccines and to be able to evade them.”
