Americans who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus are “safe from the variants that are circulating here in the United States,” the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Wednesday.
“Here in the United States, we’re fortunate,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky told NBC’s “Today” show. “We have three vaccines that we know are safe and effective. We have two-thirds of the adult population that is fully vaccinated, and really quite protected from the variants that we have circulating here in the United States.”
When host Savannah Guthrie suggested to Walensky that “the bottom line is, the CDC still says if you are vaccinated, you don’t have to wear a mask,” Walensky answered: “That’s exactly right.”
Earlier this week, the World Health Organization (WHO) caused confusion by recommending that vaccinated people continue to wear masks and practice social distancing due to the spread of the so-called “Delta variant” of coronavirus, which was first discovered in India.
“I think this is a really important thing to work to clarify,” Walensky said Wednesday. “First, we know that the WHO has to make guidelines and provide information to the world. Right now, we know, as we look across the globe, that less than 15 percent of people around the world have been vaccinated, and many of those have really only received one dose of a two-dose vaccine. There are places around the world that are surging, and so as the WHO makes those recommendations, they do so in that context.”
Also this week, Los Angeles County health officials recommended that people resume wearing masks in indoor public spaces, regardless of their vaccination status, due to an increase in cases blamed on the variant.
Walensky acknowledged that “there are areas of this country where about a third of people are vaccinated, they have low vaccination rates, and there are areas that have more disease, that have more disease in the context of people not being vaccinated.
see also
“So in those areas, we have always said, ‘Please look, make suggestions,’ but those masking policies are not to protect the vaccinated,” she added. “They’re to protect the unvaccinated.”
CDC data shows the seven-day average of new reported cases at 12,609 as of Tuesday, down from a high of more than 250,000 in early January. The most recent available seven-day average of hospital admissions due to COVID-19 was 1,822, down 1.3 percent from the previous week and down 89 percent from the peak in early January.
Walensky added that Americans who received the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine likely do not need to get a second dose of any other vaccine.
“We have every reason to believe, based on how J&J is performing with other variants of concern – and that is quite well – and how its sister vaccine, AstraZeneca, has performed against the Delta variant in other countries – which it’s done quite well there as well – so generally people are agreeing that they anticipate that the J&J will perform well against the Delta variant, as it has so far against other variants circulating in the United States,” she said.
On Tuesday, vaccine maker Moderna announced that a lab study had indicated that its vaccine had produced antibodies against several coronavirus variants, including the delta strain. Meanwhile, a study published Monday in the journal Nature suggested mRNA vaccines produced by Moderna and Pfizer could provide “persistent” protection against COVID-19 for years — provided the virus doesn’t mutate too much beyond its current forms.
As of Wednesday, the CDC said that more than 171.7 million Americans over 18 (66.5 percent of that population) had received at least one vaccine dose, while 154.9 million Americans (46.7 percent of the total population) were considered fully vaccinated.