|
 White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters
that 77% of eligible Americans had received at least one shot of a
vaccine.
Vaccination rates went up thanks to mandates put into place by
private businesses, healthcare systems, social institutions and
state and local governments, he said in a briefing.
President Joe Biden's team has struggled to vanquish the coronavirus
pandemic because a large swath of the U.S. population continues to
resist taking safe and widely available vaccines.
Biden last month announced policies requiring most healthcare
workers and federal employees to get COVID-19 vaccinations and push
large employers to have their workers inoculated or tested weekly,
but the federal rules to put the mandate into effect are still being
formalized. Some states and large employers have mandated vaccines
already.
"Since late July, when the president first announced vaccination
requirements and called on organizations to follow his lead, the
number of eligible Americans who are unvaccinated has decreased by
about one third from 97 million down to 66 million individuals,"
Zients said.
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr.
Rochelle Walensky said the seven-day average of daily COVID-19 cases
fell 12% from the previous week and the seven-day average of daily
deaths was down 5%.
But officials warned that, even with the unlikelihood of a new
variant overtaking the highly contagious Delta that has caused havoc
across the world, it was not time to let down the country's guard.
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 "Despite the recent decrease in
cases, most communities across the country are
still experiencing substantial to high levels of
community transmission," Walensky said. "We
absolutely need to stay focused on continuing to
get COVID under control around the country,
especially as we head into the fall and winter
season" through masking and vaccinations, she
said. More than 700,000 people
https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/countries-and-territories/united-states
have died in the United States from COVID-19 and getting control of
the pandemic remains a priority of the president for health,
economic and political reasons.
Last week, Biden called on https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-tout-vaccine-mandates-large-companies-chicago-trip-2021-10-07
more businesses to obligate their workers to get vaccinated. The
White House increasingly has seen such mandates as critical to
ending the pandemic, but the efforts have faced resistance in some
states led by Republican governors, especially Florida and Texas,
which argue that such requirements are an infringement on personal
freedoms.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting
by Christopher Gallagher; Editing by Alex Richardson and Peter
Cooney)
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