Fauci says unvaccinated create danger of fifth COVID-19 wave

President Biden’s chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that unvaccinated Americans could pose a threat to the country’s progress on the COVID-19 pandemic, potentially incurring a fifth wave of COVID-19 infections.

“The problem is, as we all know, we still have approximately 66 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not vaccinated. The degree to which we continue to come down in that slope will depend on how well we do about getting more people vaccinated,” Fauci told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace.

“If we don’t do very well in that regard, there’s always the danger that there’ll be enough circulating virus that you can have a stalling of the diminishing of the number of cases and when that happens, as we’ve seen in the past with other waves that we’ve been through, there’s the danger of resurgence,” Fauci said.

Fauci explained however that a resurgence of another wave of COVID-19 cases was preventable, saying that the more people get vaccinated, the less likely there will be another surge going into another winter during the pandemic.

“The more people we get vaccinated, the less likelihood there is going to be another surge as we go into the winter” – Dr. Fauci #FoxNewsSunday

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) October 17, 2021

According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 77 percent of Americans aged 12 years and older have been at least partially vaccinated while 67 percent are fully vaccinated. 

President Biden touted the progress that the U.S. has made within recent weeks, noting on Thursday that hospitalizations were down 38 percent and COVID-19 cases down 47 percent in the last six weeks. However, he warned that the country was in a “critical period” and urged those who were eligible for the vaccine but had not been inoculated yet to do so.

“My team and I are doing everything we can,” Biden said on Thursday. “I’m calling on more businesses to step up. I’m calling more parents to get their children vaccinated, when they are eligible. And I’m asking everyone, everyone who hasn’t gotten vaccinated, please get vaccinated. That’s how we put this pandemic behind us.”