More than 99 percent of the nearly 10,000 U.S. COVID-19 deaths that occurred in June were among unvaccinated people, according to Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"If you look at the number of deaths, about 99.2 percent of them are unvaccinated," Dr. Fauci said during a July 4 interview with NBC's Meet the Press. "About 0.8 percent are vaccinated. No vaccine is perfect. But when you talk about the avoidability of hospitalization and death … it's really sad and tragic that most of these are avoidable and preventable."
About 67 percent of U.S. adults had received at least their first dose as of July 4, while 47.4 percent had been fully vaccinated, according to the CDC's COVID-19 Data Tracker.
"As a nation as a whole, we are doing very well," Dr. Fauci said, pointing to the percentage of Americans who've been vaccinated. "But we have a big country with a disparity in the willingness to be vaccinated," he said.
In a recent White House COVID-19 briefing, Rochelle Walenskly, MD, CDC director, said there are about 1,000 U.S. counties, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest, where less than 30 percent of their population is inoculated against COVID-19.
In the latest interview, Dr. Fauci said he doesn't anticipate the highly transmissible delta variant, first detected in India, will spark a nationwide spike.
"You might expect to see spikes in certain regions, in certain states, cities or counties. I don't think you're going to see anything nationwide because fortunately, we have a substantial proportion of the population vaccinated," Dr. Fauci said. "We're going to see … almost two types of America."