coast. robert ray is live in clearwater, florida with the latest there. robert? yeah, trace. good afternoon. clearwater beach, mandatory evacuations in place right now. take a look out there at the gulf of mexico. there are still people trying to get their last moments of paradise here. there s surfers there. in the distance, what you might see are the outer bands. we just got the first squalls that came in. this storm is well south of off, off of naples and fort myers area. this will make its way up here, expected to be a category three storm as it will make landfall on the big bend sometimes very early tomorrow morning. this is going to get rocking soon. it will be a hostile environment here on this beach. it s mandatory evacs.
councilman, you may have seen his remarks. here s part of it.rks. i served for 20 years and i went fro fm being essential to being disposable from the mandates. ptio and my religious exemptionn a was denied. and i received those threats,mii a terminatioonn and i retired. i would love to go back toy be my job. ears i gave my best t yearso to this city. twenty years from twenty one toh forty one , and then they take it away ate the peak of cap my earning career, i made itta o captain. i went through that process. you should be ashamed ofto wor yourselves. inwas allowed to work k in this city, but i wasn t allowed to eat in a restaurant in the city. thank you very much.but it w i was allowed to work through the pandemic, but i wasn t allowea red in a restaurant that i could wear the uniform, go to a burning building, eat here.ouo thank you.pl what s wrong with you? people trust science. thank you guys. a thank you. thank s yo of course, the whole point of the vacs mandate was tot to
grocery store because why not, it is easy and simple. and i think people should get that data. but it is become more of a sort of a protect yourself and protect your family kind of mentality and with vacs that is probably okay. so in the roughly three weeks since the fda gave emergency authorization for the covid vaccine to be used for children under five, this number is incredible. only 2% of kids have actually been vaccinated. how worrisome is that to you? i think it is very worrisome because i think it you look at overall vaccine rates in kids for other vaccine preventible diseases like chicken pox and like measles, rubella, those are also down. and i think this is an effect of anti-vax political interjection into public health of the previous administration, we still have a governor in florida in desantis who hasn t ordered vaccine doses for those kids and will not administer them in state facilities. it is just crazy.
that it will, we will have another vaccine that will replace what we currently have. but i don t think it s necessarily the technology that we have to have an uphill battle against. i think it is actually crowd participation. i mean at this point, only 57% of americans have the first vaccines that we were rolling out, and in fact, only 34% had received their first booster. people are not running to get vaccinated, and that is a problem. and it is not only a problem within the united states of america, we have seen it globally, and at this point, only 20% of those persons who live in the poorest of countries have received one dose of the vaccine. it is not available to them. and again, that telephone game, it is not just applying within the united states of america. we have seen how this pandemic has shown us just how small of a community we truly are. when we think about the global community. we are related to each other. so how to stop the spread? we have to get the vacs that we have
a half, preliminary data, and the 10,000 kid trial that they ve done, which happened during omicron, during some of the worst months of that particular phase, and so once the data is looked at, and so far, there does not seem to be a safety signal, which is amazing, for the approval process, and the designation process, and then it goes to the cdc, like we ve seen for all other vacs so far, and parents may be able to potentially start vaccinating a few weeks after that. and the one thing that i want to point out is that this is a three dose vaccine and the first two doses within a month of each other and the third dose two months ought and to get the full immunity, it takes a little bit of time sow would be bumping up against the school year, and kids under five, with the third dose, many of them might fall in september or later, as they start school. doctor, i want to get to