Fauci: ‘You Use Lockdowns to Get People Vaccinated’

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” that “you use lockdowns to get people vaccinated” while discussing the extreme COVID lockdowns in China.

Mitchell said, “How concerning is the outbreak in China? We see the lockdown in Shanghai and State Department now ordering families out, all nonessential workers out of Shanghai.”

Fauci said, “China has a number of problems, two of which are that the complete lockdown, which was their approach, a strictest lockdown you’d never be able to implement in the United States. Although that prevents the spread of infection, I remember early on they were saying, and I think accurately, they were doing better than anyone else. You use lockdowns to get people vaccinated so that when you open up, you won’t have a surge of infections. Because you’re dealing with an immunologically naive population of the virus because they’ve not been exposed because of the lockdown.”

He added, “The problem is the vaccines they’ve been using are not nearly as effective as the vaccines used in the United States, UK, EU, and other places. So, they don’t have the degree of protection that’s optimal. Also, they have a lot of their older population, which are the most vulnerable among us, and so, there’s a double negative there. One, they don’t have people who are protected, and B, the people who need it most, are not getting the vaccination. That’s the source of the problem in China.”

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