local leader, who has been waiting for full fda approval to require vaccinations, i call on you now to do that, require it. reporter: tonight, the pentagon is preparing to require the shot for 1.3 million active duty troops. new york city mandating the vaccine for all school employees, without the option for weekly testing. and at united airlines, workers will have five weeks from today to show proof of vaccination. the question is whether full approval will trigger a wave of desperately needed vaccinations. about 85 million americans are eligible but have not gotten the shot. a recent poll found 3 out of 10 unvaccinated people said they would be more likely to get a shot that had full approval. a lot of other people are scared. i was waiting on the fda approval. reporter: still, more americans are dying of covid, now an average of 738 every day. florida just saw its deadliest week.
if you re a business leader, nonprofit leader, state or local leader who has been waiting for full fda approval to require vaccinations, i call on you now to do that, require it. doctor, give us a refresher on where the final approval fits in. we heard from experts that the emergency authorization was perfectly fine to take it, and what the president is getting at here because he is trying to get the business community to back up what he says the cdc and science provides for. yeah, ari. i think, number one, you certainly know that the law is on the side, even when the vaccine was authorized, not fully approved. i do know that businesses, especially state and local leaders, seen it with the mayor of new york city and the superintendent, san antonio independent school district, they all were waiting for this mandate to be able to say, this
nonprofit leader, a state or local leader, who has been waiting for full fda approval to require vaccinations, i call on you now to do that, require it. do what i did last month. require your employees to get vaccinated or face strict requirements. as i said last week, vaccination requirements have been around for decades. students, healthcare professionals, our troops, are typically required to receive vaccination, to prevent everything from polio to smallpox, measles, mumps, rubella. in fact, reason most people in america don t worry about polio, smal smallpox, measles, mumps and rubella today is because of vaccines. it only requires a vaccine to stop the spread of covid-19. with today s fda full approval, there s another good reason to get vaccinated, so please get vaccinated now.
louisiana, mississippi, more people got new vaccinations in the past month than in the prior two months combined. the progress we re making on vaccinations and i was going to produce results in the weeks ahead. the sooner you get fully vaccinated, the sooner you will be protected. according to the experts from the yale school of public health, the pace of our vaccination efforts have saved over 100,000 lives. and prevented more than 450,000 hospitalizations. this is critical progress. we need to move faster. as i mentioned before, i ve imposed vaccination requirements that will reach millions of americans. today, i am calling on more companies, i should say, in the private sector, to step up vaccine requirements that will reach millions more people. if you are a business leader, a nonprofit leader, state or local
giving full approval to the pfizer vaccine for americans 16 and older, making it the first vaccine to move past emergency use authorization. if you re one of the millions o americans who said that they will not get the shot until it has full and final approval of the fda, it has now happened. the moment you ve been waiting for is here. reporter: the president calling the fda s review process the gold standard. the pfizer vaccine found to be 91% effective in preventing covid-19. in just eight months, americans have received 200 million pfizer doses, with a billion more given around the world. the vaccine is now among the most studied in history. full approval for the pfizer vaccine now paving the way for more vaccine mandates from schools, governments and corporations. and with a surging delta variant, the president is pushing companies to act. if you re a business leader, a nonprofit leader, a state or