months after their initial booster. meanwhile, children under five, still vaccinated at all. this week, pfizer withdrew its request for the fda to prove a two dose vaccine series for this group, instead, waiting on more data. joining me now, msnbc medical contributor doctor vin gupta. he s a faculty member at the institute for health metrics and evaluation at the university of washington. all right, doctor gupta, tell me what you make of that back and forth from a science perspective, from a health perspective, between what you see democratic governors doing and what we heard there from the president? good evening, alicia. thank you for having me. i agree with the president. it is stewart lee. what we know is that indoor masking works to diminish case transmission rates. case transmission rates were capturing we may say that we re at 2 to 300,000 cases. what we know in the era of omicron, not testing enough. your 15 to 20% of the true caseload at a given day, given
the hospital admissions are the lowest point they have been throughout the pandemic. there is a clear correlation between case transmission rates and what we re seeing in hospitals based on the level of vaccine uptake in a specific community. dr. gupta, tyson foods dealt with his own outbreak last year. made a lot of national headlines. it is requiring workers to get vaccinated. a lot of these plants are based in traditionally red states with the lower vaccination rates that you and others have been concerned about. do you think this approach from major corporation could make a difference in those areas that are traditionally struggling or lagging in vaccination rates? absolutely. it s really hard, ayman, to scale direct engagement. a lot of people we try to reach through direct engagement don t have trusted medical relationships. they don t have that. the they re not in our health care system. the direct engagement is only going to scale to a certain