Good evening. Today has been a day of truly good news in the fight against COVID, but

it is tempered by what one of the leading figures in it just said about the timeline.

Today, Dr. Anthony Fauci told National Public Radio, quote, we could start to really get

some good control over this as we get back into the fall of 2022. Not this fall, next

fall. And at all depends, he said on how successful the vaccination effort is. He joins us

in a few moments. We begin with a milestone in that vital effort, the FDA granting full

approval to Pfizer's COVID vaccine for patients 16 and up. And to borrow a phrase from the

development effort that happened at warp speed, the process taking only 40% of the usual

time. While this and other vaccines have met the FDA's rigorous scientific standards

for emergency use authorization, as the first FDA approved COVID-19 vaccine, the public

can be confident that this vaccine meets the FDA's gold standards for safety, effectiveness,

and manufacturing quality that we require for an approved product.

The words that could not come a day too soon, that is because as of this weekend, the

country is back to averaging a thousand plus deaths a day from COVID. That grim figure

hasn't been this high since March. In Florida, over the weekend, hospitalizations set

a new record for the entire pandemic with more than 17,000 men, women, and children in

COVID units, ICUs, and ERs across the state. Nationally, new cases are once again averaging

close to 150,000 a day. That's nearly 10 times what they were in June and experts on this

program have predicted they'll hit 200,000 a day before this latest surge is over. If

even this case is sore, vaccine hesitancy or even outright hostility remains. And while

today's announcement might not persuade the hardest core vaccine refusers, recent polling

from the Kaiser Family Foundation, suggest that nearly one in three unvaccinated Americans

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