WASHINGTON -- The U.S. is turning the corner on the most recent surge in covid-19 cases and more people need to get vaccinated to keep infections on a declining trend, infectious-disease specialist Anthony Fauci said.
Fauci, who is President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser, said that while the full vaccination rate has reached 55%, the key risk is the 70 million eligible people in the U.S. who haven't gotten a shot.
"We certainly are turning the corner on this particular surge," Fauci said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "The way to keep it down, to make that turnaround continue to go down, is to do what we mentioned: Get vaccinated."
Fauci says he's worried that people resisting covid-19 vaccine shots based on religious grounds may be confusing that with a philosophical objection.
He says getting the covid-19 vaccine is no different in concept than receiving other vaccines such as for measles, which have been done for many years. A public health review found "very, very few, literally less than a handful" of established religions that actually oppose vaccinations, he said.
Religious exemptions have been on the rise since Biden last month announced sweeping new covid-19 vaccine mandates covering more than 100 million Americans.
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Fauci acknowledges the challenges of businesses to determine whether an employee's claimed religious exemption is more an excuse to bypass legal requirements.
"I would hope that people would understand that all of this is for their benefit, for the safety of themselves, their family and their societal responsibility," he told CNN's "State of the Union."
Study results showing that a Merck & Co. experimental pill slashed the risk of getting seriously ill or dying from covid-19 are "very impressive," Fauci said.
"So, we really look forward to the implementation of this and to its effect on people who are infected," he said. The pill is a "big deal," he said on ABC.
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Merck agreed in June to a $1.2 billion deal with the U.S. government to supply 1.7 million courses of the treatment, which raises the possibility that many virus patients could be treated before reaching the hospital.
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner under President Donald Trump and a board member for Pfizer, said that amount was "not enough" on CBS' "Face the Nation," covering only one month's worth of infections in Southern states since the delta variant emerged. He also contrasted that quantity with the national stockpile of medication to treat a flu pandemic, which he said numbers in the tens of millions.
Fauci said the government has "the option for millions more."
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"And now that we have this success, the company certainly is going to rev up and make tens and tens of millions more for the rest of the world and for us," he said on CBS.
ON IMMIGRANTS
Fauci dismissed attempts to blame immigrants and tourists as a major source of the spread of covid-19 in the U.S., a belief held by 37% of Americans overall and 55% of Republicans, according to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
"If you just look at the data and look at the people who have gotten infected, look at the people who are in the hospital, look at the people who died -- this is not driven by immigrants," Fauci said on CNN. "This is a problem within our country, the same way it's a problem with other countries throughout the world."
He declined to weigh in on whether he saw a medical reason for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to continue imposing a rule that makes it easier to expel migrants because of the pandemic.
"My feeling has always been that focusing on immigrants, expelling them or what have you, is not the solution to an outbreak," he said.
U.S. deaths since the start of the pandemic surpassed 700,000 last week in what Biden called an "astonishing death toll" that's "yet another reminder of just how important it is to get vaccinated."
"Many of those deaths were unavoidable but many, many are avoidable, were avoidable and will in the future be avoidable," Fauci said on CNN.
NURSING HOME RISE
Although nursing home deaths from covid-19 remain dramatically down from their peak at the end of last year, a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows a significant uptick in August as the delta variant swept through the country.
After declining for months, largely because of the federal effort to vaccinate residents, the number of deaths rose sharply from July to August. Nursing homes reported nearly 1,800 deaths among their residents and staff in August, which represented the highest monthly toll since February.
The findings underscore the ongoing vulnerability of nursing home residents, who are old and in poor health, and highlights the importance of getting booster shots to people in this population. The rising number of infections could fuel more calls to vaccinate nursing home workers before the federal requirement announced in August by Biden.
"While the vast majority of covid-19 deaths happened outside of nursing homes in July and August, the high rate of increase within nursing homes indicates that residents and staff in these settings are at risk of death during the delta surge," the researchers said. The study, published Friday, did not break out how many of the dead were unvaccinated.
August saw a much steeper increase in deaths in nursing homes than in the community at large, said Priya Chidambaram, a senior policy analyst for the foundation and one of the study's authors. "Vaccinations are very strongly protecting people in these facilities, but the delta variant did have an impact," she said.
Preliminary data from September may indicate deaths are falling again, she said.
Nursing homes were especially hard hit early in the pandemic, accounting for nearly one-third of the country's overall deaths through the end of June, according to the Kaiser analysis. But the vaccination of residents brought the monthly number of deaths down from a high of around 22,000 in December and January to around 300 for June and July.
Although cases did increase, "we're still nowhere near our peak in December 2020, nor at any point last year, thanks to safe and effective vaccines as well as providers' ongoing vaccination efforts and infection control measures," the American Health Care Association, a major nursing home trade group, said in a statement.
The association said infections were largely the result of a high number of cases in the surrounding community. The very small number of cases occurring "are largely happening in communities where there is high spread and low vaccination rates among the general population," the group wrote.
But the group added that it was encouraged by the recent rollout of booster shots for the Pfizer vaccine and said it was eager to follow any developments regarding the other vaccines.
While the vaccination rate among residents is now approaching 85%, according to the latest data from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, only about 65% of nursing home employees are vaccinated, roughly the same percentage as American adults overall.
Information for this article was contributed by Max Reyes of Bloomberg News, by staff of The Associated Press and by Reed Abelson of The New York Times.