Biden grappling with ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’

With dithering and disdaining, the US outbreak is being sustained by a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, fears White House Covid-19 response team as delta variant infections are surging in all 50 states due to the delta variant.

A sputtering vaccination which has remained well behind the US President Joe Biden’s target, more than 160 million American have already been vaccinated as more than 90 million eligible Americans are yet to get the shots.

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Virus maps and models are awash in red. Emergency room physicians are wringing their hands over the mixed signals on masks earlier in the season.

The seven-day average of new cases is up nearly 70 per cent over the last week, hospital admissions have climbed about 36 per cent and deaths by 26 percent, according to data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated,” Biden said Friday, echoing comments made earlier in the day by Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There is a clear message that is coming through: This is becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated. We are seeing outbreaks of cases in parts of the country that have low vaccination coverage because unvaccinated people are at risk. And communities that are fully vaccinated are generally faring well,” CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said on Friday.

Things are so grim in LA county that it has reinstated a mask mandate irrespective of vaccination status. Here, the positivity rate has increased nearly 700 per cent since last month. In the last week alone, 10 per cent of all US counties have moved into “high transmission risk”.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US Government’s top medical adviser, said about 100 countries have now been slammed by the Delta variant. According to Fauci, the “extraordinary surge” of the delta variant is now dominant in 50-70 per cent of all US cases.

The “extreme vulnerability” of people who are not vaccinated will account for infections, hospitalizations, and, ultimately, deaths, Fauci warned. He pointed to lab studies and clinical effectiveness studies showing that all three US vaccines in the mix are 96 percent effective against hospitalization in case of the delta variant.

The new government expression of frustration comes amid near disbelief that tens of millions of Americans continue to refuse to get vaccinated, needlessly extending the pandemic and costing lives, as health officials emphasize that nearly all serious cases and deaths are now preventable.

More than 99 per cent of Covid-19 deaths and 97 per cent of hospitalizations are among people who have not been vaccinated, according to the CDC.

The pandemic is now “one that predominantly threatens unvaccinated people,” White House COVID-19 coordinator Jeff Zients said Friday.

The US accounts for the world’s highest Covid-19 toll, from the start of the pandemic. The virus has killed more than 608,700 people in the US alone, from the time it first arrived on the country’s west coast in January 2020.