Californians being vaccinated

The Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on Monday, paving the way for more employers, schools and other organizations to mandate the shots.

“If you are not vaccinated, let this be the milestone that gets you there,” California’s public health officer, Dr. Tomás Aragón, said after the announcement.

Experts say that the highly contagious Delta variant not only presents an unprecedented threat to those who are not vaccinated, but has also provided ample evidence of the effectiveness of the vaccines.

In California, unvaccinated people are more than six times as likely to contract the coronavirus than those who have their shots, according to state data released on Monday.

And in Los Angeles County, the state’s most populous, an unvaccinated person is as much as 25 times more likely to be hospitalized with the disease.

“That, in a sense, is our proof that vaccines work,” said Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, an infectious-disease expert at the University of California, Los Angeles’s Fielding School of Public Health.

Similar to how states with low vaccination rates have been hard hit by the latest surge […]

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