Unvaccinated Could Be Breeding Ground, 'Cannon Fodder' For Covid Variants, US Officials Fear [View all]

- New coronavirus cases were up at least 10% in 46 states, with each infection increasing the chance of a dangerous virus mutation. The Guardian, July 17, 2021.

In anticipation of an end to the Covid-19 pandemic, states and cities across the United States have enjoyed reopening once-shuttered communities for business, leisure, summer festivities and travel as life has returned to near-normal.

However, health officials remain on high alert given one ongoing obstacle to being finished with Covid-19: wide swaths of unvaccinated people in America that could allow the virus to further mutate and potentially spawn more transmissible and increasingly deadly variants.

About 55% of all Americans are fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the CDC. That means that unvaccinated people are not only at greater risk of Covid-19 themselves, but could also potentially undermine America’s whole vaccine rollout if any future variant emerging in the US was significantly resistant to the shots.

“Unvaccinated people are basically the cannon fodder of the virus. The virus needs people to infect in order to replicate and the more people it has that are vulnerable or susceptible to infection, the more likely it will mutate,” said Dr Michael Saag, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham...

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/17/unvaccinated-coronavirus-covid-variants-us