Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s lead adviser on COVID-19, said Tuesday that local governments should demand teachers to get the vaccine.
During the MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Fauci said that the risks coming from the Delta variant are so “serious” that he is now supporting of vaccine requirements.
“I’m going to upset some people on this, but I think we should” have vaccine mandates for teachers, Fauci said. “We are in a critical situation now. We’ve had 615,000+ deaths and we are in a major surge now as we’re going into the fall, into the school season.”
“This is very serious business,” Fauci continued. “You would wish that people would see why it’s so important to get vaccinated. But you’re not going to get mandates centrally from the federal government.”
Instead of federal requirements, Fauci said there should be local requirements “for schools, for teachers, for universities, for colleges.”
“I”m sorry, I mean I know people must like to have their individual freedom and not be told to do something, but I think we’re in such a serious situation now, that under certain circumstances, mandates should be done,” he said.
Fauci has once said said that Americans should anticipate a “flood” of COVID-19 vaccine requirements once the Food and Drug Administration gives a complete approval to one or more of the vaccines.
More than a dozen big U.S. corporations have already enacted vaccine requirements for some or all of their workers. Walmart, Google, Tyson Foods, and United Airlines were some of the most recent companies to demand workers to be vaccinated to keep their jobs.
Tyson Foods CEO Donnie King announced the company’s vaccine requirement on August 3, stating all employees to have the vaccine no later than Nov. 1.
“We did not take this decision lightly. We have spent months encouraging our team members to get vaccinated – today, under half of our team members are. We take this step today because nothing is more important than our team members’ health and safety, and we thank them for the work they do, every day, to help us feed this country, and our world,” King said.
United Airlines will demand all 67,000 of its U.S.-based employees to be completely vaccinated by Oct. 25 or possibly lose their jobs.
Walmart, which has 1.6 million U.S. employees, is demanding all corporate and management staff to be vaccinated while blue-collar employees in areas with great rates of COVID-19 transmission are demanded to wear a mask.
Reported by the New York Times COVID-19 tracker, the daily average reported cases on Monday was 124,470, a raise of 118% over two weeks. As the Delta variant spreads, the U.S. is averaging more than 100,000 cases per day for the first time since February. About half of all United States citizens and nearly 61% of adults are now completely vaccinated.