US’ Vow To Return To Normalcy, Difficult To Achieve If People Still Doubt The Vaccine

by Jay Ahon / Mar 13, 2021 05:06 AM EST

A man walks by the New York Stock Exchange building, New York city.

Despite the constant reassurance from the United States President Joe Biden for his people to get vaccinated, a huge number of the country's population are still skeptical about the coronavirus vaccine, which could highly affect the country's economy and its vow to return to normalcy, an expert said.

Dr. Vin Gupta, a lung doctor and NBC medical contributor said that the trajectory of this pandemic to the detriment of all Americans could possibly be determined by the recent poll that says around 49% of Republican men said they don't want to get vaccinated for Coronavirus.

He added that all the recent forecasts say that "we're going to be past the worst of this with normalcy" by around the end of June and early July. This, however, will depend on the number of people who will get vaccinated "to the tune of 75% to 80% of eligible adults by that time period".

If the country cannot get more people vaccinated for COVID-19, it could not achieve its goal of a rapid return to normalcy as promised by President Biden in his first primetime address as President last Thursday night.

US President Biden, in his address, said that "after this long, hard year, it will make this Independence Day something truly special, where we not only mark our independence as a nation, but we begin to mark our independence from this virus."

"If that's not the case -if there's skepticism or hesitancy that high - we're not going to get there," Gupta said.

These trajectories are based on the models of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) from the University of Washington that say America could still record around 100,000 COVID-19 cases and have at least 1,000 deaths per day if the number of people who are eligible for getting vaccinated was below projections.

Gupta, who is also an affiliate assistant professor at the University of Washington's IHME and an ICU doctor, said in an interview that COVID-19 could possibly turn into an endemic, which means it will be found in the population regularly, something people would have to live with.