Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that the US is "going in the wrong direction" as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, particularly among unvaccinated Americans.
"If you look at the inflection of the curve of new cases and, as you said in the run-in to this interview, that it is among the unvaccinated. And since we have 50% of the country is not fully vaccinated, that's a problem," Fauci told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" when asked about a model projecting a worst-case scenario of 4,000 deaths a day in the US from Covid-19, if vaccination rates do not improve.
The chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and the nation's top infectious disease expert added that the majority of those deaths could be among the unvaccinated.
"So it really is, as (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) Dr. (Rochelle) Walensky has said many times and I have said, it is really a pandemic among the unvaccinated, so this is an issue predominantly among the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we're out there, practically pleading with the unvaccinated people to go out and get vaccinated," he said.
The warning from Fauci comes as the dangerous Delta variant of Covid-19 sweeps across the nation and health officials caution Americans to remain vigilant in preventing its spread. Every state in the US reported more Covid-19 cases in the week ending Friday than the week prior, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, with the gravity of the situation evident from coast to coast.
Thirty states have yet to fully vaccinate at least half of their residents, according to the CDC. And as of Friday, the daily average of people becoming fully vaccinated was the lowest it had been since the end of January.