Home Depot Facilitates Vaccination, Joins Retailers who are Again Requiring Masking

     Home Depot has joined many other large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, in once again, requiring all its workers to wear masks, regardless of vaccination status or the transmission risks of the area.

      “As the COVID variant continues to spread…We’ll ask customers to wear masks while in our stores and continue to offer masks to those who don’t have one,” Home Depot wrote in a statement.

     In addition, Home Depot strongly encourages all associates to get vaccinated, and the company offers helping in making vaccination appointments and funding for childcare and transportation to and from vaccination appointments.

     Vaccination is crucial right now because without it, COVID will continue to mutate into different strains, continue to infect people, and eventually result in a strain that will not respond any vaccine, explained Anthony Fauci, MD, who has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984.

     “When you get the overwhelming majority of the population vaccinated – and we don't know what that threshold is – the virus will disappear, and then we won't need to worry about it, at least in this country,” said Dr. Fauci, who is the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden. “If you don't do that, you will get a smoldering level of infection that will just go right into the fall, get confused with influenza in the winter, and then come back again in the spring.”

     Addressing the unvaccinated who do not fear a serious outcome if they get infected or reinfected with COVID, Dr. Fauci, who also said that he was hopeful that the Food and Drug Administration will give full approval to the vaccine by the end of August, told the editorial board of USA Today, “If you were living in a vacuum, that would be fine, but you're not living in a vacuum.

    “You are living in a society. And if you become the vehicle for the virus to go from you to someone else to someone else, you are helping to propagate the virus.”

    A virus cannot mutate, unless it is replicating, and, if the unvaccinated continue to allow the virus to freely and repeatedly replicate in many people, the virus will mutate, said Dr. Fauci said, who added that when a mutation causes a variant like Delta, which spreads quite rapidly and is allowed to replicate for months because of the 90 million Americans who are not vaccinated, eventually, we could get a variant that eludes the protection of the vaccine.

     "Why should I get vaccinated?" Dr. Fauci repeated many Americans asking. "Well, because we don't want you to wind up in the intensive care unit (ICU) in a hospital, and I can guarantee you 99% that if you get vaccinated, you are not going to wind up in the ICU."