As cases and hospitalizations rise across the country, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said on Sunday that businesses asking employees for proof of vaccination or regular testing were taking steps “in the right direction.”
“I think anything we can do to encourage reluctant folks to get vaccinated — because they’ll want to be part of these public events — that’s a good thing,” Dr. Collins said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Dr. Collins said he was pleased to see companies such as Disney and Walmart asking their employees to get vaccinated. And he expressed support for President Biden’s decision last week requiring federal workers to get the vaccine or, “if they’re not, to get regular testing, which is inconvenient.”
“All of those steps I think are in the right direction,” Dr. Collins said.
When asked whether airlines should require proof of vaccination for passengers, Dr. Collins said that the decision was up to the airlines, but that it could motivate people to get vaccinated if they want to be able to travel.
Businesses and government agencies are recommending or requiring employees to get vaccinated amid a surge in coronavirus infections across the country. In the past two weeks, new infections have risen 148 percent in the United States, and hospitalizations have increased 73 percent, according to New York Times data.
The surge has been largely attributed to the highly contagious Delta variant, and to low vaccination rates in some states.
In an interview on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, emphasized the importance of getting more Americans vaccinated as the country faces the more contagious Delta variant of the virus, which is now the dominant source of U.S. infections.
“We’ve really got to get those people to change their minds, make it easy for them, convince them, do something to get them to be vaccinated, because they are the ones that are propagating this outbreak,” he said.
Dr. Fauci also addressed the recommendation last week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that Americans wear masks, regardless of vaccination status, in areas where transmission rates are high. The recommendation was issued days before the agency released a report on Friday suggesting that fully vaccinated people with so-called breakthrough infections of the Delta variant are capable of spreading the virus to others just as readily as unvaccinated people.
“We’re now dealing with a virus that has an extraordinary capability of spreading from person to person,” Dr. Fauci said. “So when you superimpose one on the other, you have a very difficult situation, a pool of unvaccinated people and a virus that spreads very efficiently.”