During a March 10 appearance on CNN, former Baltimore health commissioner Dr. Leana Wen discussed how to overcome "vaccine hesitancy" among the population. "We have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status," she said. "Because otherwise, if everything is reopened, then what's the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine?" "We need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life." "So that's why I think the CDC and Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, 'If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all these freedoms you have,'" she said. <blockquote>DR. LEANA WEN: My main concern is that we're not going to reach herd immunity because of vaccine hesitancy. And I know that's hard for a lot of people to believe, who desperately want the vaccine right now, and they're thinking, "oh, it's just a small percentage of people who are actually anti-vaxxers," and that's true, there's the anti-science, anti-vaxxer contingent But there are many more people, millions of people who for whatever reason have concerns about the vaccine, who just don't know what's in it for them. And we need to make it clear to them that the vaccine is the ticket back to pre-pandemic life. And the window to do that is really narrowing. You were mentioning about how all these states are reopening. They're reopening at 100%. And we have a very narrow window to tie reopening policy to vaccination status. Because otherwise, if everything is reopened, then what's the carrot going to be? How are we going to incentivize people to actually get the vaccine? So that's why I think the CDC and Biden administration needs to come out a lot bolder and say, "If you are vaccinated, you can do all these things. Here are all these freedoms you have." Because otherwise, people are going to go out and enjoy these freedoms anyway, and I fear a situation of coming into the Fall where we never reach herd immunity, and then we get hit by the next surge of COVID-19 in the fall. Something we could have prevented, if we just got people vaccinated now.</blockquote>