The culprit is the insufficient rate of vaccinations, and a solution may be to mandate that people take action to protect themselves and their community, said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee.
“We’ve hit a wall,” Offit told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Wednesday. “We’ve gotten to the point where you have to compel people to do the right thing.”
“There was a time we were giving 3 million doses a day. If we’d stayed that course, we could be at roughly 80% population immunity,” Offit said.
The US averaged more than 63,600 new daily cases over the last week — an average that’s generally risen since the country hit a 2021 low of 11,299 daily on June 22, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
As of Wednesday, cases have risen in all but one state in the past seven days compared to the week before, and cases rose at least 50% in 36 states in that time, according to…
