Covid-19: alert for increased mortality in the US 1:05
(CNN) -
With COVID-19 cases on the rise and hospitalizations in communities with low vaccination rates, one expert says Americans face a trade-off: get vaccinated or continue to deal with the impacts of the pandemic.
"We can't have it both ways; we can't go without wearing masks and without social distancing and without vaccinating. That won't work," Dr. Jonathan Reiner, CNN medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at George Washington University, said Monday. .
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Covid-19 cases in the country increased 47% over the past week as the most transmissible delta variant spread, but not all communities were affected equally.
About a third of the nation's cases occurred in five states, Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri and Nevada, Reiner said.
And the impact was felt most among the unvaccinated.
Of all deaths from the virus in June, more than 99% were among unvaccinated people, said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, for its acronym in English).
"We have to choose sides and the side is that we have to get vaccinated," Reiner said.
"We have the tools to beat it, we can beat it this summer, but the way to do it is vaccination."
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To get more Americans vaccinated, officials will need to address the reasons behind some of the public's concerns.
For some, it's that the vaccines haven't been fully approved, which Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN is only a matter of time.
And for others, the political divide has inhibited vaccination, but Reiner stressed that with more than 600,000 Americans killed, it is the virus that should be seen as the enemy, not vaccines.
In Arkansas, which has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the U.S. at 35% according to CDC data, Little Rock Mayor Frank Scott Jr. said that as a black man, he was skeptical of receive a vaccine, but now he wants to lead the plan to ensure that all residents are vaccinated.
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"This is serious and we shouldn't have to allow someone to die for us to really believe in research and science. What we continue to do is follow data-driven policies and research and everything we do in our administration, and this is just another way to continue to do so because, again, this saves lives, "Scott said.
'Nothing changed' after Pfizer booster meeting
Federal health officials met with vaccine maker Pfizer / BioNTech on Monday to discuss whether and when a booster dose of its Covid-19 vaccine might be necessary.
Pfizer presented data to federal health officials for about an hour suggesting that reinforcements will be needed soon to maintain covid-19 protection, but Fauci told CNN after the meeting: "Nothing has really changed."
He said that based on current data, federal health agencies, such as the CDC and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), are not ready to recommend a booster.
"We made it very clear that your data is part of a much bigger puzzle," Fauci told CNN's Chris Cuomo.
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The meeting came after Pfizer said last week that it is seeing a decline in the immunity of its coronavirus vaccine and is resuming its efforts to develop a booster vaccine to protect people from the variants.
Pfizer emphasized in a statement Monday that it will publish "more definitive data in a peer-reviewed journal and will continue to work with regulatory authorities to ensure that our vaccine continues to offer the highest degree of protection possible."
The message Fauci hopes the public will take away from the meeting, he said, is that the discussion about boosters does not mean that current vaccines are not offering enough protection against the virus.
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"What we are talking about is not necessarily how good they are, because they are undoubtedly fabulous," he said.
"It is the durability of the response that is in question, which is perfectly reasonable when it comes to a vaccine.
"We don't know how long that extraordinarily high degree of protection is going to last and that's what we're talking about."
Boosters are not recommended now, but that doesn't mean that at some point they won't be advised for the entire population or for specific vulnerable groups, he said.
For example, Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor School of Medicine, said Monday that it was surprising that there was no discussion during the briefing on boosters for immunosuppressed people.
A 'giant wave' closing in on unvaccinated Americans
The infection rate among unvaccinated Americans is much higher, CNN medical analyst Sanjay Gupta said Monday, so much so that the United States will soon move from a divide between vaccinated and unvaccinated populations to vaccinated and infected.
Dr. Howard Jarvis, an emergency physician in Springfield, Missouri, told CNN on Monday that his sick patients are not vaccinated.
"If they are sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, they are not vaccinated. That is the absolute common denominator among those patients," he said.
"I can see the regret on their face. You know, we asked them, because we want to know, are you vaccinated? And it's very clear that many of them regret (not having been vaccinated)."
The delta variant is a "covid-19 on steroids," according to one expert, as cases rise across much of the US.
In St. Louis County, Missouri, officials said new cases have risen 63% over the past two weeks, and County Executive Sam Page said "a tidal wave is coming to our non-populations. vaccinated ".
Covid-19-related hospital admissions rates increased 36% over the past two weeks in the St. Louis metropolitan area, according to a report from the St. Louis County Department of Public Health.
"This variant is spreading rapidly and has the ability to devastate those in its path, which is why it is so important to get vaccinated now," Page said.
CNN's Kendall Lanier, Kaitlin Collins, Amanda Sealy, Lauren Mascarenhas, Deidre McPhillips, and Steve Almasy contributed to this report.
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