vaccinated and writing president biden should be applauded for his administration s vaccine efforts. that shift in tone coincides with the delta vary yants tearing across the u.s. hitting conservative lee eaning states especially hard where vaccination rates are the lowest in the country. it s safe and effective. i wanted to show the picture to encourage medium. reporter: some republican lawmakers are being more outspoken to encourage people to get the shots. steve scalise announced he got first dose on sunday after seeing the covid scases rise. i was ready to get the vaccine. i always felt it was safe and effective. reporter: in his stats of louisiana la, only 30% of people are fully vaccinated an the daily case rate is three times the national average. mitch mcconnell who survived polio and advocated for people to get vaccinated did not mince words this week.
bipartisan deal with his bipartisan group of lawmakers outside the white house. they were celebrating. we still don t have actual legislation yet. we don t have bill text. they are working to figure out how to pay for this. they do not have 60 votes. they aren t going to get joe manchin to change his mind about the filibuster. that is the issue that is stuck. you have the issue of immigration that they are basically trying to push through in this broader infrastructure and social safety net bill that they will try to pass along democratic lines. i think that will be really long shot too. i think they have a lot of work to do and we are at a critical moment whether or not the president s agenda can really move past that covid relief bill they passed earlier this year. thanks to all of you. jim, i will tell you one
delta is widespread. that s pretty much now getting do be a lot of the country. delta is now 83% of the viral isolations in the u.s. that happened really fast. yeah, these were not empty warnings from health officials like yourself. we re starting to see awful cases in the hospitals across the country. starting next month in new york city, health care workers will have to get vaccinated or be tested for the coronavirus every week. do you think it s time to man date vaccines in this country. what do you think? part of the debate is whether, in fact, it s possible to do that for a vaccine that s approved under emergency use. if it was approved with full approval from fda which we all anticipate may be coming pretty soon in the next couple of months, then the league ability to mandate becomes a lot stronger.
to get things going and try to put donald trump in the rearview mirror. to some degree, he s made good on the promises. big covid relief act. republicans that voted against him in some cases are taking credit for it but you also have the delta variant beginning to storm its way back and part of the message is to appeal to people and say look, this is on us. if you want to get this over with, you can t expect the government to do it alone. you need to be part of it. you wrote and research about his career. what do you think he ll draw on during this pivotal moment in the presidency because i think the one thing that voters entrusted to him more than anything was defeating covid, and this resurgence of covid in the delta variant i think puts that somewhat in jeopardy, does it not? that promise and that hope that a lot of americans had for his presidency. that s been a signature hallmark of the presidency so far and part of his message tonight is to say if we want that, if you like be
covid fundamentally is neighbor to neighbor, family member to family member. there are limits to what the president can do. if you take a look across the board, young people think they won t get very sick. it s got to be family member. when you look at the minority communities, a lot of fear about the way african-americans have been treated in the past. that has to be churches. that has to be family members, neighbors. when it comes to those that live in rural communities, they live there for reason. they don t want to listen to anybody else. they want to be independent and that is going to go through organizations like the farm bureau, neighbor to neighbor again to solve that. let s not put that all on the president. on infrastructure, i hop we re going to get a deal. speaking of the bridge, the reason why p we haven t had it fixed is because the people, the legislatures in kentucky played politics and didn t want to vote. you use the bridge, you pay for it. we did in in ohio. it s wh