Chief White House medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci said Thursday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” that President Joe Biden was “being somewhat moderate” by going forward with vaccine mandates.
CNN medical contributor Sanjay Gupta said, “When it comes to the mandates through the Department of Labor and companies that have 100 or more employees, my understanding of what the president was saying, Dr. Fauci, was that either you get a vaccine or you have to be tested regularly. Oftentimes, it seems like these two things are commingled, like do one or the other. But in one case, you are preventing it. In the other case, you are diagnosing it. Why not just do the vaccine mandate? and not say that the testing can be sort of this off-ramp?”
Fauci said, “Well, I think the President is, you know, being somewhat moderate in his demand if you want to call it that, in that there are some people who really don’t want to get vaccinated, but they don’t want to lose their job. You got to give them an off-lane, and the off-lane is if you get tested frequently enough and find out you’re positive, you won’t come to work, and you won’t infect other people. So, it really is somewhat of a compromise there. Myself, I would make it just vaccinate or not, but he was trying to be moderate in what his pronouncement was.”
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