CNN Medical Analyst Wen: Life ‘Needs to Be Hard’ for Unvaccinated Americans

CNN medical contributor Dr. Leana Wen said Friday that life needs to be “hard” for Americans who have not received a coronavirus vaccine with “twice weekly testings.”

Wen, the former Planned Parenthood president, said, “So now we have this delta variant that is much more contagious. Because it’s more contagious, it’s going to be even harder for us to reach herd immunity. We’re going to have to vaccinate an even higher proportion of people to get there. What happens, then, if we end up having another variant developing that’s even more contagious, that could cause more disease, that could evade the protection of our immune system?”

She added, “So how quickly we can get this under control and which way we go depends on what we do now to overcome disinformation. What we really need to do at this point is make vaccination the easy choice. It needs to be hard for people to remain unvaccinated. Right now, it’s kind of the opposite. It’s fine. It’s easy if you’re unvaccinated. You can do anything you want to do anyway. At some point, these mandates by workplaces, by schools, I think it will be important to say, hey, if you want to opt-out, you have to sign these forms, get twice weekly testing. Basically, we want to make getting vaccinated the easy choice. That is what it’s going to take for us to actually end the pandemic.”

Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN