The nation’s top infectious disease expert is clarifying remarks over the weekend about how much precautions Americans should take during the holidays.
In a Sunday interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said it’s still too soon to tell whether Americans should avoid gathering for the holidays, as the nation sees an increase in COVID-19 cases among kids and the number of new vaccinations lags.
But as Fauci explained to CNN’s Kate Bolduan Monday afternoon, those remarks were later misinterpreted.
That was misinterpreted as my saying we can’t spend Christmas with our families, which was absolutely not the case … I encourage people, particularly the vaccinated people who are protected, to have a good normal Christmas with your family.” Dr. Fauci today. pic.twitter.com/9hqkeqdq73
— Kate Bolduan (@KateBolduan) October 4, 2021
“I was asked, what can we predict for this winter — for like December and Christmas?” he explained to Bolduan.
” … I said, we don’t know because we’ve seen slopes that went down, and then came back up. The best way to assure that we’ll be in good shape as we get into the winter, would be to get more and more people vaccinated,” Fauci said.
“That was misinterpreted as my saying, ‘we can’t spend Christmas with our families,’ which was absolutely not the case.”
Fauci went on to remark that misinterpreting his words is “just the way all of the other disinformation goes around.”
When Bolduan asked Fauci if it was realistic to predict the course of the pandemic two months out, Fauci said: “That’s really dependent on us. … The one thing we do have within our power to do is to make sure that there are less and less cases.”
And that, he explained, means more people getting vaccinated.
“That was the point that I was making,” he said. “Not that you’re not going to be able to spend Christmas with your family. I certainly am. That’s for sure.”
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