🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
John Banzhaf III, an emeritus professor of public interest law at the George Washington University Law School, has claimed the now majority of Americans vaccinated against coronavirus should be sheltered from disproportionately bearing the pandemic's financial burden.
The expert's call for an alteration on how the pandemic's effects are to be paid for coincides with a spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data states the latest 7-day average for new hospital admissions between August 11 and 17 was 11,521, a 14.2 percent increase from the previous average.
Banzhaf told Newsweek why believes the argument for stopping "burdening the vaccinated" is actually "stronger" than asking those who smoke to cough up.
He said: "Smokers—even those addicted to nicotine—often pay more for life and health insurance ... because otherwise everyone would pay those costs through higher taxes and bloated premiums.
"It's much easier to get vaccinated, and COVID's costs are comparable, so the argument is stronger.
"Limiting access to those vaccinated would also mean no masks required in many places, including airplanes and many offices. That's what's happening, so let's stop burdening the vaccinated."
As of 6 a.m. ET on August 26, 172,171,009 Americans had been fully vaccinated (51.7 percent of the U.S. population) according to the CDC.
The retired founder and executive director of Action on Smoking and Health has a history of campaigning for distributing public health costs, in particular highlighting the costs related to the tobacco industry.
Equating smoking to refusing to get vaccinated, he wrote in a CNN opinion piece: "When it became clear that secondhand smoke threatened the health and very lives of blameless nonsmokers, governments and those in charge got tough on smoking in public."
The call for a policy change arrived the same day Dr. Paul Offit, of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's vaccine advisory committee, claiming the dangers of the Delta variant is being exacerbated by large numbers of Americans' refusal to be vaccinated.
Dr. Offit told CNN Health: "The numbers now ... are actually in many ways worse than last August.
"Last August, we had a fully susceptible population, [and] we didn't have a vaccine.
"Now, we have half the country vaccinated ... but nonetheless the numbers are worse. The Delta variant is one big game changer."
The calls for accelerated vaccination rates were made a day after the Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) described the global number of COVID-19 cases and deaths as "stable at a very high level."
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in an August 25 WHO media briefing: "As long as this virus is circulating anywhere, it's a threat everywhere.
"There are no shortcuts. WHO continues to recommend a comprehensive, risk-based approach of proven public health and social measures, in combination with equitable COVID-19 vaccination."
Update 8/27/21, 12:15 p.m. ET: This article was updated with comment from Banzhaf.
