U.S. COVID-19 vaccine rates up thanks to mandates; cases and deaths down
-officials
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[October 14, 2021]
By Jeff Mason and Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Vaccination rates
against COVID-19 in the United States have risen by more than 20
percentage points after multiple institutions adopted vaccine
requirements, while case numbers and deaths from the virus are down,
Biden administration officials said on Wednesday.
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.
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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%.
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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.
"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 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 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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