Republicans who refuse to vaccinate against Covid-19 are actively working against efforts to lift the coronavirus restrictions that they say are a violation of their civil liberties, Drs. Anthony Fauci, the U.S. government’s leading expert on infectious diseases, said Sunday.
Fauci, who was involved in a heated exchange with Republican Congressman Jim Jordan on Thursday, told CNN’s State of the Union he was frustrated by recent studies that showed that up to 45% of Republicans would not take the vaccine.
“The fact that one does not want to be vaccinated, in this case an alarmingly large portion of Republicans, actually only works against where they want to be,” he said.
‘They want to be able to say that these restrictions placed by the public health recommendations are things that they are very concerned about. But the way to get rid of these restrictions is to get as many people vaccinated as quickly and as effectively as possible.
“If it is absolutely certain, you will see that the virus level in the community goes down and down to the point where you do not have to have the public health restrictions.”
Fauci said the attitude of Republican vaccine deniers is ‘paradoxical’.
‘On the one hand, they want to be relieved of the restrictions. “On the other hand, they do not want to be vaccinated, it makes almost no sense,” he said. “It’s a matter of public health, it’s not a civil liberties issue.”
Fauci clashed with Jordan, an Ohio congressman, when U.S. top health officials testified before Congress Thursday, and Jordan asked Fauci when Americans “get their freedom and liberties back.”
“We are not talking about freedoms. “We are talking about a pandemic that killed 560,000 Americans,” Fauci told Congressman.
About one in four members of the House of Representatives had not yet been vaccinated in March, three months after shots were made available. A list of those not vaccinated is not publicly available, but several Republican lawmakers have admitted they do not intend to get a sting.
Fauci’s comments come amid a revival of Covid-19 in the US, with an 8% increase in new cases in the past two weeks, even though the number of vaccines continues to grow, according to the Centers for Disease Control and prevention (CDC).
Fauci said the single and Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the use of which was suspended in the US last week after reports of extremely rare and severe blood clots in six women, could be heard again at a meeting of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices on Friday. (ACIP).
“I seriously doubt they’ll just cancel it,” he later told NBC’s Meet the Press. ‘I do think there is likely to be a warning, restriction or risk assessment. I do not think [the advisory committee] going to say, ‘everything is fine’, I think it will probably say, ‘OK, we’ll use it, but be careful under these certain circumstances’. ”
He said that although the occurrence of blood clots was rare, “there are six cases in nearly seven million people”, he said that the temporary suspension of the J&J vaccine was necessary.
“There is a dual reason to do this, to stop and look at it in more detail and to make sure that the doctors treat people appropriately,” he said.
Meanwhile, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer acknowledged Sunday that her state was at a “very serious moment” as new infections continued to increase, but she continued to resist growing pressure over the restrictions she lifted in March. , reset.
Michigan has become a new hotspot of Covid-19, with hospitalizations setting a new pandemic record last week and the state recording more than 2,200 cases of the B117 coronavirus variant, more than a tenth of the total for the whole USA.
“In the waning months my legislature has been suing, I lost in a Republican-controlled Supreme Court, and I do not have all the exact tools,” Whitmer told MTP host Chuck Todd who asked if she supported . away from a firmer stance.
“Despite these things, we still have some of the strongest mitigation measures in the country, masked mandates, capacity constraints, work from home. We’re moving fast to shoot arms, a million in two weeks, a million in the last nine days. [But] I work with a smaller set of tools at my disposal.
“We are at a very serious moment, and that is exactly why we will continue to follow science, urge people to do the right things, maintain our mitigation and move vaccination as quickly as possible.”
Worldwide, coronavirus deaths surpassed the grim three-million milestone on Saturday. Jeremy Farrar, director of the British Wellcome Trust, warned that the actual number of deaths was likely to be much higher.
“It is worrying that this pandemic is still growing at an alarming rate. “Hundreds of thousands die every month,” he said.
According to Johns Hopkins University on Sunday, the US led the world in Covid-19 deaths with 566,937 deaths and nearly 32 million cases, more than twice as many as any other country.