Governor J.B. Pritzker says he does not think there is a need to increase vaccine mandates now that the Pfizer vaccine has been fully approved.
This morning, the FDA announced full approval of the vaccine that has been administered in over two hundred million doses in the U.S.
The U.S. is the first county to fully approve the Pfizer vaccine. Governor Pritzker said this morning that he believes the announcement will help with vaccine hesitancy.
“At this point now, today, as a result of what the FDA has done, there is reams and reams of research that has now been done that prove these vaccines are effective especially the mRNA vaccines like Pfizer, and so I’m very happy about that. I think so many people may have been hesitant wondering whether it was approved too quickly.
Now literally almost a year later we now have so much research to show these work. I’m very happy about that I think that means many more people will choose to get vaccinated. And I do think there will be private institutions that will choose to require vaccinations now that it’s no longer under UA.”
The full approval of the vaccine by the FDA prompted the Pentagon to announce soon after that all U.S. service members will now be required to get the vaccine.
During a press conference today after speaking at the University of Illinois today, Pritzker was asked if the state should be doing more genomic sequencing of positive cases to determine how prevalent the Delta variant is in Illinois.
“Truly the vast vast majority of the cases that are occurring here in Illinois and all across the country are the Delta variant. But we will continue to sequence and make sure that we are delivering the information to all the proper authorities including those of our team here at Shield who have been delivering to us their projections and modeling about where this virus is going.”
Pritzker says the state is delivering all of the information requested by the federal government in genomic sequencing data and has been for some time now.
On Friday the Illinois Department of Public Health announced over 24,600 new cases of COVID had been confirmed over the last week.
Morgan County will announce the joint weekly updated numbers for the last week later this afternoon.