Get vaccinated

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joined with U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in a special virtual event, a serious one on Tuesday to talk about what's been done and yet to be done on the covid-19 pandemic with a big focus, according to the ag secretary, on convincing Americans, especially rural Americans, to get vaccinated and… to reduce the concern that people may have about any risk associated with vaccinations and to make sure that we do everything we possibly can to make it as easy as possible for people in rural areas to get that shot in The arm.

And Dr. Murthy says people need to realize… any risks associated with a vaccine are by far exceeded by the benefits in terms of lives saved, hospitalizations prevented. Dr. Moorthy says the U.S. is still seeing 50000 new covid cases every day, hundreds of deaths. And getting everyone vaccinated is the only way out of this.

What's the latest progress on getting Americans vaccinated against covid? At this point? We have more than one hundred and forty million Americans who received at least one shot of the vaccine. Out of a resident population of almost three hundred thirty one and a half million. Dr. Murthy says the U.S. still leads the world in vaccinations. But… we still have more than 50 thousand people a day getting infected with covid 19. We're losing hundreds of people a day still. And so we've got work to do. And so he says in the next couple of months, you're going to see a continued expansion into one of vaccine distribution efforts and you're going to see more and more doctors getting vaccine in their offices and being able to actually give them directly to patients. And the other thing you're going to see is a real expansion of the education efforts, the vaccine information Efforts, because he says there's a lot of false information out there and some resistance by some people in some places to being vaccinated at all. Gary Crawford for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.