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WASHINGTON – Coronavirus rates are rising and masks are returning in some areas, but President Biden got a simple message on Wednesday night: Get vaccinated against the coronavirus and, after that, don’t worry about reports of “groundbreaking infections “, which have caused some vaccinated people to test positive for the coronavirus.
“There are very, very, very, very, very, very few people” who contracted COVID-19 after being fully vaccinated, the president told reporters. And these infections, he added, “are not life threatening” because coronavirus vaccines are exceptionally effective in preventing serious and critical illness.
Some vaccinated people could still experience unpleasant symptoms if they were infected but, as the President pointed out, it is extremely unlikely that they will feel much more than that.
“I don’t know of any where they are hospitalized, in intensive care and / or died,” Biden said of these groundbreaking cases. He may have been referring to something that the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, said last week, namely that 99.5% of Americans who died from COVID in June were not vaccinated.
The rise of the more transmissible Delta variant has fueled concerns that a new wave of coronavirus is within reach. But while the variant spreads easily, it doesn’t necessarily cause more serious illness.
“We know the Delta variant may be easier to give and get,” Brookings Institution fellow and former political aide in the Obama administration, Dr. Kavita Patel, told Yahoo News. “We know it can reproduce in the body faster. We don’t believe this results in more deaths or hospitalizations than expected. “
Fully vaccinated people are as protected against Delta as they are against any other variant of the coronavirus. “There is no doubt that if you are vaccinated you are much more protected and safer than someone who is not vaccinated because you are at a much lower risk of getting infected. Period, ”Patel said.
Biden continued to plead with people to get vaccinated; there is unanimous agreement that vaccines, not masks or containments, will lead to an end to the pandemic. Life has largely returned to normal in highly vaccinated areas of the country, even as the coronavirus proliferates in states like Florida, Arkansas and Missouri, where restrictions have been lifted but vaccinations have not not been strongly encouraged.
Biden made his remarks about the peak infections Wednesday night as he left Cincinnati on his way back to Washington, DC. He had just wrapped up a CNN town hall in which he made much the same point.
“We have a pandemic for those who haven’t been vaccinated,” Biden told CNN presenter Don Lemon, adding a little later: “There’s a simple and basic proposition: If you’re vaccinated, you don’t. ‘You’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an intensive care unit, and you’re not going to die.
He added that “this is not a pandemic,” an apparent reference to areas of the country where community spread has effectively been halted. The difference in vaccination rates has spawned “two COVID countries,” as Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine recently explained to Yahoo News.
During the first months of his administration, Biden was accused by some critics of being too cautious in lifting the crippling restrictions that have marked most of 2020. They said he should have vigorously called for schools to reopen for teaching in person, and that he could have removed his mask as soon as he and the other White House staff were fully immunized.
More recently, however, it has become apparent that Biden is anxious to get past the pandemic. After all, the return of lockdowns and other restrictions, like another year of distance learning in schools, would almost certainly frustrate the economic recovery that will help shape the legacy of his administration.
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