Vice President Kamala Harris is trying to appeal to people's faith in vaccine hesitancy. "I do believe the act of getting vaccinated is the very essence of what the Bible tells us when it says love thy neighbor," Harris said.
Harris spoke in Detroit at an event in an attempt to get more people vaccinated.
Last week, the Biden administration missed their July 4 goal to get 70% of Americans partially vaccinated. The vice president marked the “incredible,” progress the country has made in getting vaccinated but said now is the time to build on that progress.
“So, I'm here to say, thank you. Congratulations and we have more work to do,” Harris said.
Harris streamlined the initiatives Biden laid out last week to enable more Americans to get their vaccines, saying it boiled down to two parts: “bringing the facts” and more vaccines. Harris insisted that going door to door to provide information was necessary to reach people who were receiving bad information.
"Sadly there’s a lot of misinformation. Let’s know what it is and talk to our neighbors and say these are the facts," she said of the strategy. "Let's take it to the streets, take it to the people."
In working to convince vaccine skeptics, Harris said it was important not to appear judgmental: "Let’s not do this in a way where we judge anybody, not looking down on anybody," she said.
Harris called the Delta variant "no joke" and noted that most hospitalizations and deaths are currently among people who haven't been vaccinated.
"Virtually every person who is in the hospital, sick with COVID-19, is unvaccinated," Harris said. "The loss, the tragedy of that loss, literally every person who has died from COVID-19 that we recently seen was unvaccinated."
(CNN contributed to this report.)
