“Unvaccinated Americans should not be allowed to work, have access to children,” former Obama administration health expert says

While the vaccination rates lag across the country and we are moving further from herd immunity, new Covid-19 cases are increasing in all 50 states in the last couple of weeks. It remains unclear if Biden administration door-to-door vaccination plan will improve the vaccination rates as many people see this move as a ‘pressure’ to get vaccinated.

“We’re seeing this because the public misunderstood the CDC guidance for fully vaccinated people as ‘We can now do whatever we want. Even if we are unvaccinated, we can now behave as if we are vaccinated,'” CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday.

The latest data shows that new cases are increasing for 10% every week. Meanwhile, at least 38 states are seeing at least 50% increase in new confirmed cases. As of today, only 48.3% of the US population are fully vaccinated which is far from Biden administration goal to reach 70% of the population vaccinated with at least one dose until July 4.

In the states with lowest vaccination rates like Arkansas, where the vaccination rate is 35.1%, the Delta variant has had a big impact. Hospitals in Arkansas are “full right now and cases are doubling every 10 days,” Chancellor of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Cam Patterson said.

While the health experts and officials have been pushing for vaccination from the very start of the vaccination process in the country, some of them went even further in an effort to convince the people to take the shot.

One of them is the former Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius who said that Americans who have not received a coronavirus vaccine should not be allowed to work or have access to children and be limited on where they are allowed to go, Sibelius said on Tuesday on CNN’s “OutFront”.

“We’re in a situation where we have a wildly effective vaccine, multiple choices, lots available, free of charge, and we have folks who are just saying I won’t do it. I think that it’s time to say to those folks, it’s fine if you don’t choose to get vaccinated. You may not come to work. You may not have access to a situation where you’re going to put my grandchildren in jeopardy. Where you might kill them, or you might put them in a situation where they’re going to carry the virus to someone in a high-risk position,” Sebelius said.

She continued, “That’s, I think the point where we are, is freedom is one thing, but freedom when you harm others like secondhand smoke and issues that we’ve dealt with very clearly in the past you can’t drive drunk. You can drink, but you can’t drive drunk because you can injure other people. You can’t smoke inside of a public place where you can give cancer to someone else in spite of their never having been a smoker.”

Sebelius added, “So I think we’re reaching that point in the United States where those of us who are vaccinated, I want to take off my mask. I want to be able to live my life with vaccination, and right now, I’m being impinged on by people who say I don’t want to get vaccinated. It’s fine. I want them to maybe have a limitation on where they can go and who they can possibly infect.”