Andy Slavitt, White House senior advisor for Covid response, predicted that a growing number of Americans will continue to take the Covid vaccine due to messaging and evidence from trusted sources.
“In Israel where they’re a little bit ahead of us, 89% of seniors have chosen to take the vaccine,” Slavitt said. “We think we can get up to those kinds of numbers, if we just continue to reliably answer people’s questions, because these are very good, safe, effective vaccines.”
Roughly 37% of people in the U.S. over the age of 65 have been fully vaccinated, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. States administered about 17 million shots in the last week alone.
In order to facilitate the vaccine distribution further, the Biden administration announced it will roll out a nationwide vaccine availability website to serve as a link among the multitude of vaccination registration websites from states, pharmacies and other businesses.
Slavitt told CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” that “the idea would be if you put in your zip code, it would show you on a map, all of the places near you that claim to have vaccines.” He added that streamlining the process would not only decrease widespread frustration, but also vaccine hesitancy.
Host Shepard Smith pressed Slavitt about his comments regarding vaccine passports. At a White House Press briefing on Monday, Slavitt said that vaccine passports should be free, private, and secure, however, it’s “not the role of the government to hold that data and to do that.”
Slavitt said Tuesday evening that a government-run vaccine passport effort could lead some Americans to think the government is too involved, especially in the collection of data that would be necessary for a vaccine passport. That resistance, he said, would be counterproductive to the overall vaccination effort.
“We think that the public will be more reluctant to get vaccinated if they feel like the government, the federal government is playing too much of a role in that,” Slavitt said.