Dr. Ali Khan told CNN on Monday that he would like to see vaccines for Covid-19 mandated in “certain settings.”
“If you look at who is getting severe disease in the United States, it is invariably people who have not been vaccinated,” Khan — a dean at the University of Nebraska’s College of Public Health — said in an interview with CNN’s Jim Sciutto and Poppy Harlow. “So the solution isn’t to give a booster to people who have already been vaccinated. It’s to get the initial doses to the people who have been unvaccinated.”
Noting the number of Covid-19 cases in Nebraska exceeded the national average, he added, “The solution is straightforward. It’s get vaccinated. And there is no doubt that in certain settings we should be mandate vaccination. Health-care settings, long-term care settings, prisons, other large settings with lots of people. We should be mandating vaccination, and I’d like to see that extended to other settings, obviously.
Dr. Anthony Fauci motivated debate over the issue after a Sunday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper in which Fauci said he wanted to see more entities outside government develop vaccine mandates. “I do believe that at the local level, Jake, there should be more mandates. There really should be. We’re talking about [a] life and death situation.”
More than 184 million Americans — or 55.5 percent of the country — had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine as of July 12, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 159 million — or 48 percent — had been fully vaccinated.
*story by MEDIAite
