“What’s coming next is that we are going to have to continue to get people vaccinated so that right now, even in states in which you have a good relative proportion of people vaccinated, you have to get the overwhelming proportion of people vaccinated. But you also have to do mitigation. And that gets to the controversial issue of mask-wearing and the mandating of things mandating of vaccines, for example, for teachers and people in the personnel in the school, but also in situations as uncomfortable as we know and controversial as we know it is with regard to masks wearing, particularly in the situation in schools, we’ve just got to realize that we’re dealing with a public health crisis. And the more you get infections, the more spread you get, the greater opportunity the virus has to continue to evolve and mutate.”

“Right now, we are fortunate in that the vaccines that we have are quite good against the Delta variant, particularly with regard to preventing severe disease with hospitalizations and deaths. We certainly are getting what are called breakthrough infections, which means a person who was vaccinated might get infected and actually may even spread the virus. But in general, those people are not the ones who are getting seriously ill and dying. It’s the unvaccinated that are doing that. So we have a lot of tasks. We’ve got to do mitigation, put aside all of these issues of concern about liberties and personal liberties, and realize we have a common enemy, and that common enemy is the virus. And we really have to all pull together to get on top of this. Otherwise, we’re going to continue to suffer as we’re seeing right now.”