covid together as a nation could be one of those rallying the nation moments. and i think you were trying to get at that as well. what are your thoughts on that? so we lose the equivalent number of dead as we lost on 9/11 every two days in the united states to covid. and the one thing that was notable to all of us in the aftermath of 9/11 is there were no democrats, no republicans, just americans. there was really really the one time in my life where i have felt that we were really one people. and now i feel that we are a divided country at a time where people are at war. we ve lost 660,000 americans. my cousin, my friend s dad, my colleague at work s mom. everyone is basically one degree of separation away from someone who has died from this virus and we need to come together.
but if we weren t as vaccinated as we are now, you would see naends of dead per day, hospitals being crushed. no availability to treat people with heart attack or stroke. no elective surgery in the united states. having said that if we can vaccinate another 15% of this country we can get back to living the kind of lives that everyone wants to. you were just talking about unity. we know that s not the case. and when it comes to mask requirements, for example, that is what causes people to just be at each other s throats. there s a segment of the population that will not accept this and we were seeing this earlier in the past week at one school board meeting. a student was advocating for masks in tennessee and he was being abused as he was trying to make the case. let s watch. i m worried about my family. if i get covid, i m going to bring it to my family.
or risk seeing and scalia said i don t top see all the work i ve done 25 years be undone by someone being replaced by me. we saw justice breyer who wants the court to remain independent but is grapple with a political question and recognizes he is not that political expert here. but there is a real question before him. and i think that s the most sort of tell we ve seen from him yet. maybe the biggest question hanging over everything right now in our politics is, what is going to happen to the direction of the supreme court. guys, we covered a lot of ground. great to see you. john avlon, margaret hoover. let s do it again soon. thanks so much. coming up next kids ages 5 to 11 may be able to get the covid vaccine by halloween. here s what we re learning after the break. you re live in the cnn newsroom. so you can focus on what matters most. that s how we ve become the leader in 5g. #1 in customer satisfaction. and a partner who includes 5g in every plan,
and i talk to my grandparents a lot. they are higher risk than me. i don t want to give them covid. this time last year my grandmother, who was a former teacher at the rutherford county school system, died of covid because someone wasn t wearing a mask. this is a very no. this is a very shut up. that absolutely broke my heart when i found that because here is a student because here s a school student talking about a relative who had died. he thinks because of mask issues and so on. and you can see the people behind him laughing at him. that, to me, is, in a nutshell, what is wrong with this country right now. what the hell is going on when people are laughing at a kid pouring out his heart like that? we don t respect each other. my daughter is a law student in a school that requires vaccination for all students.
president biden has announced a sweeping new vaccine policy that could cover 100 million americans. why? because less than 54% of the population is fully vaccinated against covid. a long way from herd immunity. this morning the surgeon general said he expects the vaccine requirements to boost the number of people getting the shots. we know that these kind of requirements actually work to improve our vaccination rates. tyson foods, for example, which put in a vaccine requirement recently saw that its vaccination rate went from 45% to more than 70% in a very short period of time. and they re not even at their deadline yet. so this is the next step. but some experts fear the coming legal battle will over the policy will ultimately slow vaccination and with me now to talk about it is medical analyst and professor of medicine and surgery at george washington university, dr. jonathan reiner. you have advocated for these mandates for a while now. how do you see this playing out?