President Joe Biden on Tuesday pleaded with Americans to get vaccinated and unveiled a new grassroots effort to make the vaccine more accessible, including going door-to-door and visiting houses of worship.
“Now we need to go community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood and often times door-to-door- literally knocking on doors, to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said during remarks from the White House.
The president said 42,000 local pharmacies will serve as vaccine centers. The vaccines could also be made available at workplaces, summer festivals, and sporting events through mobile clinics.
Biden warned that the new Delta variant is contributing to a rise in cases and endangering lives.
“Our fight against this virus is not over,” Biden said. “Right now, as I speak to you, millions of Americans are still unvaccinated and unprotected. And because of that, their communities are at risk, their friends are at risk, the people that they care about are at risk.”
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Biden was told during a briefing Tuesday that the Delta variant was responsible for half of all the new coronavirus cases in many parts of the country.
“It’s more easily transmissible, potentially more dangerous,” Biden said during his remarks.
The Delta variant is currently the most prominent strain of the coronavirus and is hardening the line between the fully vaccinated and those who aren’t. Scientists believe it poses an elevated threat to the unvaccinated.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said on Thursday that preliminary data collected over the past six months showed that 99.5% of people who died from COVID-19 were unvaccinated.
“It is clear that communities where people remain unvaccinated are communities that remain vulnerable,” she said.
Delta strain infections contributed to a 10% rise in daily COVID-19 cases late last month, according to the CDC. That’s still a 95% drop from peak levels in the US in January.
Meanwhile, daily vaccination numbers have fallen steeply since they peaked in April. Still, President Biden said that 160 million Americans will be likely be fully vaccinated by the end of the week.
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