Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that about 99.2% of recent deaths from COVID-19 in the United States were unvaccinated people.
“It's really sad and tragic that most all of these are avoidable and preventable,” Fauci told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“The overwhelming proportion of people who get into trouble are the unvaccinated, which is the reason why we say this is really entirely avoidable and preventable,” he added.
At the same time, Fauci noted that the US is “very fortunate” it has “enough vaccines to vaccinate essentially everybody in the country. And there are people throughout the world who would do anything to get vaccines.”
The United States has registered over 605,000 deaths in the pandemic, the highest national toll in the world.
The death toll in the US from COVID-19 recently surpassed 600,000 people, three months after it surpassed a half-million coronavirus deaths.
The rate of severe illness and death has fallen dramatically as more and more people get vaccinated, but hundreds of people are still dying daily.
Despite this, the country is registering its fewest cases since the pandemic began, as a result of current levels of vaccination, people who have gained a degree of immunity from past infection, as well as seasonality associated with the virus.