Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s top medical adviser, predicted Americans will increasingly be subjected to vaccine mandates as soon as any COVID-19 shot receives full approval from federal regulators.
The infectious disease expert said Friday that he thinks COVID-19 shots will be mandated locally, not federally, once a vaccine is given the full approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Appearing on MSNBC, Dr. Fauci said he suspects organizations “will feel empowered to locally mandate that people get vaccinated” against COVID-19 once the FDA grants its full approval to any of the shots.
“If you want to go to this college or this university in person, you got to be vaccinated. If you want to work in this enterprise, in this organization, you got to get vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci explained.
“I think you’re going to see a lot of that at the local level, and hopefully that will get a lot more people vaccinated,” Dr. Fauci added.
The FDA has already granted emergency use authorization to three different vaccines developed to prevent severe infection of COVID-19, the contagious respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
Full approval from the FDA is pending, however, although Dr. Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has said that may change as soon as next month.
Dr. Fauci predicted “a flood” of vaccine mandates being imposed by schools and businesses across the U.S. once the FDA fully approves a preventive COVID-19 shot, USA Today reported.
“Organizations, enterprises, universities, colleges that have been reluctant to mandate at the local level will feel much more confident,” Dr. Fauci told USA Today’s editorial board, the outlet reported.
Half the U.S. is fully vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). About 93 million eligible Americans remain unvaccinated, however, said Dr. Fauci.
More than 600,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 since early 2020, and public health officials have said that nearly all of the people to succumb to the disease had not been vaccinated first.
Several private companies recently announced they will require employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, including United Airlines and Live Nation, the concert promotion company, both on Friday.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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