Tuesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci pumped the breaks on the Texas Rangers’ full-capacity home-opener.
Fauci cautioned against declaring “victory prematurely” when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, saying relaxing on masking and distancing is “really taking a pretty big risk.”
“We’re looking at kind of a race between the vaccine, which is highly efficacious, and a real — I don’t want to say surge because surge means you get a really high increase — we’re seeing it start to creep up now. So, the real question is the efficacy of the vaccine going to prevent that from going up the way we saw it in previous surges? I hope not,” Fauci stated. “I don’t think so because as long as we keep vaccinating people efficiently and effectively, I don’t think that’s going to happen. That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to still see increases in cases.”
He continued, “Whether it explodes into a real surge or not remains to be seen. I think that the vaccine is going to prevent that from happening. But the other wild card in this, Joe, is that even though everybody has COVID-19 fatigue and wants to get back to normality, you know, you see the pictures of the Texas Rangers stadium essentially crowded, we don’t want to declare victory prematurely because we have a virus out there now, this variant that spreads really quite efficiently, and if you pull back on masking and avoiding congregate setting, you’re really taking a pretty big risk. If we can just hang in there a bit longer because every day that we hang in there and not just give into getting away from all restrictions, every day we do better and better because 3 to 4 million people get vaccinated.”
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