Top health officials warned that vaccine hesitancy posed a risk to getting enough Americans inoculated to stop the spread of Covid-19, and they encouraged individuals to get vaccinated.
“If we’re going to be able to put Covid-19 behind us, we need to have all Americans take part in getting us to that point,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said separately that the U.S. has made good progress on vaccinations overall but that the level of infections remains precarious at an average of nearly 60,000 daily cases in the past week as of Friday. “We don’t want that to go up,” Dr. Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.”
Dr. Collins highlighted pockets of the country that are falling behind on vaccinations.
“You can look at the map and say, ‘Where are vaccines lagging?’ Those are the places to worry about,” Dr. Collins said. “We could change that if we can really inspire everybody to get engaged.”