Citing “vaccine hesitancy and refusal” and “a confluence of new factors” such as the emerging COVID variants, virologist Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development, is predicting that unless mass vaccination occurs quickly in southern U.S. states, an “acceleration in hospitalizations and ICU admissions” will occur there this summer.
Hotez, who talks about ways to address the “new world order in disease and global health,” in his recently-released book, “Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science,” writes in the Daily Beast that not only will lack of vaccination cause the number of COVID variant cases to pick up in July and August in the South, but they will “disproportionately affect children, adolescents and young adults, and possibly include the multisystem inflammatory syndrome already reported during the COVID-19 pandemic.
On top of that, these young people, who subsequently will get the disease because of their failure to be vaccinated, will prolong the pandemic and even cause break-through cases in vaccinated individuals — even in states where 70% of the population have been vaccinated.
“We must therefore double down on efforts to vaccinate the South,” Hotez says. “The nation has to be fully and evenly vaccinated if we are to have any hope of navigating our way out of this epidemic.”
SOURCES:
Daily Beast June 11, 2021
Daily Beast June 14, 2021