As long lines form in Florida, US makes vaccination goal

Jeff Zients, White House Coronavirus coordinator: “With these ongoing efforts, there’s a strong sense of progress and you see it in the number of shots we’re getting into people’s arms each day. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a nearly 70% increase in the average number of new people getting vaccinated each and every day. In the last seven days alone, three million Americans have gotten their first shot. That’s the highest seven day total since July 4th. And just today, we hit 70% of adults with at least one shot, including 90% of seniors with at least one shot. These are significant milestones in our fight against the virus. And it’s very important to note in the states with the highest case rates, daily vaccination rates have more than doubled. The eight states with the highest current case rates have seen an average increase of 171% in the number of people newly vaccinated each day over the past three weeks.”

Dr Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden’s Chief Medical adviser: “When you look at breakthrough infections, as I mentioned, they’re expected on a usually asymptomatic. As of July 26, the CDC received 6,587 reports of breakthrough infections that resulted in hospitalization or death among 163 fully vaccinated million people. That is a percentage of 0.01% or less. And would you look at the breakthrough cases, the percent of breakthrough cases in multiple locations like D.C. and Virginia, the percent ranges from 0.26 to 0.03. So I’m sorry that was left out. The bottom line is they are rare and they rarely result, not rarely, but unusually result in hospitalization or death.”

“That if you’re dealing with the same variants, if you get infected with an alpha variant or another variant and that you recover from that you are pretty well protected for a reasonable period of time from reinfection. It isn’t perfect, but it’s good protection. You can’t doubt that. The situation changes when you’re dealing with the evolution of a new variant such as the delta variant and what we are seeing right now, that there are reinfections. The protection you get from the original infection still exists somewhat, but reinfections occur at a much greater rate among individuals now than we did against the original alpha. So bottom line is, when you’re dealing with a variant, you don’t get the kind of protection that you would have hoped to have gotten from a previous infection. Regarding the issue of vaccinating people, there’s no doubt when you vaccinate someone who has had an original infection and it was recovered, not only do you increase the depth of the of the protection, not only decrease the duration, but you also increase the breadth of it so that you cover not only the original but the variants. And that’s the reason why the recommendation still holds that even though you’ve been infected previously in the context of variance, it’s a good idea to get vaccinated anyway.”