COVID-19: Unvaccinated populations act as 'breeding grounds' for virus, warn experts

Health experts have warned that the ‘swaths’ of unvaccinated people in the United States could further allow the emergence of COVID-19 variants which are more deadly and vaccine-resistant. As per The Guardian report, it implies that the unvaccinated people are not only at a greater risk of COVID-19 themselves, but they hold the potential to undermine America’s entire mass rollout of coronavirus vaccine if any future variant emerging in the country was potentially resistant to the jabs. 

Dr Michael Saag, a professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, as per the media outlet flagged concerns over unvaccinated people in the country saying that they are basically “the cannon fodder of the virus.” Further elaborating, he said that the coronavirus requires more ground to transmit in order to replicate and the more people the pathogen infects, “the more likely it will mutate.”

Southern US states lag behind in vaccination

Meanwhile, CNN reported that 46 US states recorded at least a 10 per cent increase in the new COVID-19 cases as of July 14 as travel advisories have been declared for several states including Nevada and Florida because of a surge in coronavirus infection. As the cases continue to witness an uptick trend and US President Joe Biden’s administration missing the July 4 deadline of vaccinating 70 per cent of the citizens, the focus remains on the mass rollout of the jabs. 

Together with federal, state and local health officials, the Biden administration is encouraging people to get vaccinated especially the younger adults at the earliest. However, as per the report, despite the efforts to dramatically boost the vaccination rates, many southern states continue to lag behind.  Dr Susan Hassig, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine reportedly said that the challenge the authorities are presently facing in the public health response is “that we’ve gotten the ‘easy’ people in terms of vaccination. The ones that were eager for it, that couldn’t wait to get it.”

Hassig also reportedly noted that the unvaccinated populations irrespective of size are still a “breeding ground” where the coronavirus will eventually generate some form of mutation that can pose a problem for the health experts. Saag also said that it has been the “concern all along” because the viruses are just going to continue to “emerge and it’s just a question of chance and a question of time, whether one of the variants will be resistant, to some degree, to the existing immunity provided by the vaccination.”

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