Fauci Cautions Against Declaring Victory In COVID Fight ‘Prematurely’ As Cases Drop In US

**FILED FROM CAMERA — PLEASE TONE, CROP & DOUBLE CHECK CAPTIONS•• The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis holds a hearing on the Capitol Hill in Washington, on Thursday, April 15, 2021. Amr Alfiky/The New York Times
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIAID and Chief Medical Advisor to the President, testifies at a House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis hearing on April 15, 2021. (Photo by Amr Alfiky-Pool/Getty Images)
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Though COVID-19 cases in the U.S. are going down while the number of vaccinations is ramping up, Americans shouldn’t get complacent about the state of the pandemic, warns top White House COVID-19 expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

In an interview with the Guardian published on Monday, Fauci asserted that “[w]e don’t want to declare victory prematurely because we still have a ways to go.”

“But the more and more people that can get vaccinated, as a community, the community will be safer and safer,” he added.

Still, “We cannot abandon public health measures when you still have a degree of viral activity in the broad community in the United States,” the health official said. “Although we’re down to less than 30,000 infections per day, that’s still a lot of infections per day.”

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that more than half of American adults had been fully vaccinated at the time of writing. And 62.6 percent of adults have had at least one shot of the vaccine.

“Today, in our current day, the accessibility and the convenience of getting a vaccine is really rather striking,” Fauci told the Guardian.

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Notable Replies

  1. Too late! It’s full Miami Beach out there most places. There will be another wave.

  2. He’s right. The UK is starting to see an uptick of cases due to the Indian variant. There is now a new Vietnamese version. In addition, data show that the rate of infection for the unvaccinated is just as high today as it was in January. We may end up in a situation where when the Indian variant hits working class areas and red counties with low vaccination rates pretty hard and the vaccinated areas are unaffected.

  3. Maybe, but with the country tipping over 50% of adults vaccinated, it may only be local mini-waves and not widespread. Basically those parts of the country (read Red states) where mask compliance and vaccine uptake is poor

    Here in WA, 62% of the total population over the age of 16 has had a first vaccination. The number is higher in more liberal parts of the state like King County, with 74% of those over 16 vaccinated.

    We’re getting near the point where we’re not going to be at risk when some fool from a Red state who refuses vaccination comes out here to visit. I’m more worried about international travel and the risk of variants, but we’ll just have to see how that goes.

  4. Oh, there will still be risk from his gun and his mama’s lawyer.

  5. Avatar for kovie kovie says:

    I don’t know what Fauci’s talking about. After wearing seat belts my whole life I’ve never been injured in a car accident, so I’ve stopped using them since obviously they’ve worked!

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