Fauci says COVID-19 is now an ‘outbreak among the unvaccinated’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said on Sunday that COVID-19 is now an “outbreak among the unvaccinated” while discussing the potential for future surges in infections throughout the country.

“It’s really an outbreak among the unvaccinated. So this is an issue, predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we’re out there practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated,” Fauci told host Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

When asked about models and projections examining the potential future increases in COVID-19 cases, Fauci told Tapper, “It’s not going to be good.”

“We’re going in the wrong direction. If you look at the inflection of the curve of new cases and as you said in the run in to this interview, that it is among the unvaccinated, and since we have 50 percent of the country is not fully vaccinated, that’s a problem, particularly when you have a variant, like delta, which has this extraordinary characteristic of being able to spread very efficiently and very easily from person to person, and we know we have many, many, many vulnerable people in this country who are unvaccinated,” Fauci continued.

He also said “we have the tools to blunt that and make that model wrong,” but their success hinges on vaccinating the rest of the population.

“If we don’t vaccinate people the model is going to predict that we’re going to be in trouble as we continue to get more and more cases,” Fauci added.

When asked by Tapper if “almost entirely the victims will be unvaccinated Americans,” Fauci responded, “Well, yes.”

“If you are vaccinated the vaccine is highly protective against the delta variant, particularly against severe disease leading to hospitalization and sometimes ultimately to death,” he said.

A number of reports in recent weeks have shown that the majority of new coronavirus infections are occurring in people who have not been inoculated against COVID-19.

Earlier this month, Fauci said more than 99 percent of the people who died from COVID-19 in June were not vaccinated. He said at the time that the loss of lift was “avoidable and preventable.”

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said earlier this month that COVID-19 is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”