Story at a glance
- “I don’t think people really should be concerned as they gather with family this July Fourth,” Scott Gottlieb told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.
- “There’s sort of isolated parts of the country where you’re seeing infection levels rise. The rest of the country looks very good,” Gottlieb said.
- According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 64 percent of eligible Americans have received one dose of vaccine while more than 55 percent are fully vaccinated.
Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Scott Gottlieb says Americans should feel relatively safe getting together over the Fourth of July weekend as the U.S. has a high vaccination rate.
“I don’t think people really should be concerned as they gather with family this July Fourth,” Gottlieb told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.
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“In some parts of the country where you see prevalence rising, Missouri, parts of Nevada, Arkansas, Oklahoma, I think people should exercise more caution. But there’s sort of isolated parts of the country where you’re seeing infection levels rise. The rest of the country looks very good,” Gottlieb said.
The U.S. is currently averaging about 12,600 cases per day, a 10 percent increase from last week. But while there’s been a slight increase, cases are still down 95 percent compared with the nation’s peak in January, when hundreds of thousands of cases were being reported each day.
Hospitalization rates and deaths are continuing to decline as more Americans become vaccinated. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 64 percent of eligible Americans have received one dose of vaccine while more than 55 percent are fully vaccinated.
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“At this point we have enough of a trend to suggest that you’re just going to see a decoupling right now, and you’re not going to see the extreme outcomes from the virus in parts of the world where vaccination rates are high, and that includes the United States,” Gottlieb told CNBC.
He emphasized, however, that there are still “pockets of vulnerability here in the U.S. that we need to be worried about.” According to the CDC, about 1,000 counties in the U.S. have vaccination coverage of less than 30 percent.
The Fourth of July weekend comes as federal health officials have their eye on the highly contagious delta variant circulating across the country.
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