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Seventy percent of American adults have received at least one injection of a Covid vaccine, according to data released by the CDC on Monday, about a month away from President Joe Biden’s target of July 4.
The 70% target set by Biden in May is seen by federal health officials as a crucial step in achieving so-called herd immunity – when enough people in a given community have antibodies to a specific disease.
While the milestone is a significant achievement for the nation, it should be seen as a floor rather than a ceiling, especially as the highly contagious delta variant spreads, according to health experts.
“We need to vaccinate at least 80% of the population to really have some form of herd immunity,” said Dr. Paul Offit, voting member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Advisory Committee on Vaccines and Related Biologics. , in a recent interview. . “It’s a pretty contagious virus.”
Dr Natasha Bhuyan, family doctor at One Medical in Phoenix, said that while the 70% nationwide mark is remarkable, local communities with lower vaccination rates are still a concern.
“Even if America reaches 70% or 75%, if we continue to have zip codes and neighborhoods at 40 or 50%, they will continue to risk having epidemics and being hot spots,” a- she declared. “Even if we hit the 70% milestone, we can celebrate, but we have to celebrate it with caution.”
The updated data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes nearly a week after the agency reversed course of its previous guidelines and recommended fully vaccinated Americans who live in areas with high infection rates to Covid to resume wearing face masks indoors. The guidelines cover about two-thirds of the U.S. population, according to a CNBC analysis.
While the delta variant hits unvaccinated people hardest, some vaccinated people could carry higher levels of the virus than previously thought and could pass it on to others, the director of the hospital said last week. CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky. She added that the variant behaves “only differently from earlier strains of the virus.”
U.S. health officials argue that the Covid vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are highly protective against the variant, particularly against serious illness and death. Yet the pace of vaccinations in the United States has slowed in recent months.
The country reported an average of around 660,000 vaccinations per day on Sunday, according to the CDC, far from record levels of more than 3 million daily vaccinations in mid-April, but up 14% from the previous week.
The number of first doses of the vaccine has increased more sharply than the overall rate in recent days, representing more people receiving their first injections. On average, about 432,000 first doses were given each day over the past seven days Sunday, according to the CDC, up 24% from the previous week. States with the lowest vaccination rates and the worst epidemics experience the largest increases in first doses, a CNBC analysis found.
Immunization rates vary widely across the country. Twenty states and the District of Columbia surpassed the 70% adult mark with a single injection on Sunday, according to CDC data, with Vermont, Hawaii, Massachusetts and Connecticut each crossing the 80% mark.
Other states are lagging behind, and 12 have less than 60% of adults with at least one injection. Mississippi, with 50% of adults, has the lowest rate, followed by Wyoming with 52.2% and Louisiana with 53.6%.
In an attempt to increase the number of vaccines administered, some state and local officials have either offered incentives to be vaccinated or imposed warrants.
Biden last week called on state and local authorities to offer residents cash payments of $ 100 to get them vaccinated, his administration’s latest attempt to get more Americans vaccinated.
Biden also called on school districts across the country to hold pop-up vaccination clinics in the coming weeks, while asking federal pharmacy program partners to work with schools. He also announced that a Covid reimbursement program, which reimbursed small and medium-sized businesses that offered paid time off to their employees to get vaccinated, would be extended to also include workers’ family members and children.
—Kevin Breuninger of CNBC contributed to this report.
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