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'If you are getting federal funding, there should be a vaccine mandate': Doctor

New Jersey Emergency Medicine Physician Dr. Anand Swaminathan joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to talk the latest coronavirus developments.

Video Transcript

- But as we look at trends, we've got to talk about COVID-19 because we're seeing still a trend in hospitalization that is leaving many hospitals without ICU beds. And then the President's going to address the nation at 5:00 PM this afternoon. Of course, Washington time that's 5:00 PM till midnight because he's usually running late. But that said, what are we going to hear from President Biden? Let's get some more from all of this and where we stand with COVID from Dr. Anand Swaminathan, emergency medicine physician from New Jersey. And it's good to have you here. What do you want to hear from President Biden?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: I think there's a number of things that we as a country should expect to hear. I think the first should be about increased mandates on vaccination. All federal workers is a good start. All health care workers. All teachers and staff in schools. If you are getting federal funding, there should be a vaccine mandate. There should be a vaccine mandate for all businesses. We know that mandates help. They help to push the vaccination forward, get more people vaccinated.

We've kind of moved past the carrot's area. And now we're getting to sticks. And we need to have those mandates in place. Going forward from there, let's have mandates on travel. If you're going to be flying, you should be vaccinated. That is the safest thing to do. So I think we need to see a lot more mandates on vaccination. The next thing is about testing. We need to see more about testing, both in terms of how easy it is to get access to testing, and then specific recommendations, especially for schools, on how testing should be done. We should be doing surveillance testing in school, which means that we're going to test people whether they have symptoms or not, especially in the unvaccinated kids, in order to detect a surge before it actually happens.

So we need to see expanded and improved testing access. And we should be sending tests to everybody's house. Everybody in the country should have tests readily available so they can test themselves, their children before they go out of the house to see whether they're infectious. I think those are some of the big things we need to hear. More vaccine mandates. Directions on how to do that. And then directions for school on how best to keep our kids safe.

- And doctor, as the Delta variant-- I mean, it seems like in some of the states that really led the way with the surge in the variant. We've seen cases plateau. Other states, though however, we're seeing cases rapidly rise. We're seeing hospitalizations also rise as well. Have we seen the worst of the Delta variant in this country? Or is this something that we haven't even seen peak yet?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: This is a really hard one to know because we don't have a lot to go on. We see that other countries had some pretty rapid drops. But we don't know why those drops occurred. I don't think we're going to see a real drop or a sustained drop unless we do the things that are necessary, which means vaccinating, and testing, and masking. These are the things that we know can protect each other. Until we see that, I don't think we're going to see a drop in the Delta variant cases that are happening.

And I think we have to look to those areas where Delta cases never really spiked or there haven't been significant rates of spikes and significant rates of hospitalization. Most of that is in the Northeast right now. So what did those places do that kept Delta under control during this time period? But we really are having a hard time predicting when this is going to stop or when it's going to start falling. We are seeing some plateauing, which is reassuring. But we really need more time to see where that's going to go.

- Would it make sense, though, if we were to look at, for instance, India-- and I think that their spike, the trajectory is roughly two months, and then you get the downward trend. And they certainly didn't have a vaccine regimen that would equal ours. So can we expect that too, that the peak in this Delta variant is just about now, and then we will just naturally go down?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: I think we'd all like to think that that's what's going to happen. But we don't know because the epidemiologists, the virologists, all of the experts that are looking at both Britain and India of why they had those drops, we can't really figure it out. We can't figure out what it was that led to those drops. Exactly like you said in India, it's not like mass vaccination all of a sudden happened and they had a drop in cases. So we don't know what stimulated that drop. And because we don't know what stimulated, it's really hard to project what we're going to see. Again, those plateaus that's happening right now, that's great. Let's see a sustained plateau, or more importantly, a sustained drop before we start to say, OK, now we can make some predictions about where we're going.

- Doctor, earlier this week, we had the head of the WHO calling on all countries to halt booster shots through the end of the year. It's similar to what we've heard from the WHO previously. But will that put the American population at risk? I mean, how critical is it from your view that we do start booster shots as soon as possible?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: I think there are certain groups where booster shots are clearly going to be recommended. And in those groups, it's almost not a booster shot. It's the third shot in a series. The severely immunosuppressed, the elderly who are frail, those groups probably weren't adequately vaccinated with two doses. For everybody else, I don't think a booster is necessary at this time because we have to understand what these vaccinations can do. They can't prevent all cases.

Their job is to prevent serious cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. And they're still doing that at a very high rate. They're extremely effective for that. So I don't think boosters are indicated. Instead, what we should be focused on is getting those extra doses or the doses that we have abroad. So getting everybody here that we can vaccinated, focusing on that, and then getting those vaccinations to other places in the world where if we don't stop transmission, we're going to be dealing with a new variant, and another new variant, and another new variant. And that's really where the focus should be, not on boosters for the entire public.

- I want to turn our attention back to something that we lived with for a long time, the flu, and the predictions that this flu season could be worse than the last one. Is that because most of us won't be wearing masks this year? Or is there something else at play?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: Well, this is another area where predictions are really difficult because we often predict our flu season based on what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. Specifically, Australia and Southeast Asia can help to give us a little bit of an idea of what our flu season is going to look like. But if you look in Australia, they're mostly locked down. So they're not having that flu surge, which makes it hard for us to predict what our flu season is going to look like.

I didn't see a single case of flu last year. And a lot of us are chalking that up to the distancing, and the masking, and not being indoors with other people as to why we didn't see that. If we can protect each other by masking, then I think the flu season will be mild again. But we don't know that yet. We don't know exactly what's going to happen. We might see a huge resurgence because people are very mask resistant. And until we have really consistent, clear messaging on how important that is, we could see some large surges in flu, which could really create a lot of problems because hospitals are already at that tipping or breaking point. And if you add onto that a surge of flu cases, these hospitals are going to crumble.

- We appreciate your taking time to join us, Dr. Anand Swaminathan. And I just want to say that if Room Rater gets a shot of your room, they should give you extra points for the R2-D2 schematic. All the best to you, doctor.

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