Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and medical advisor to the White House, is confident that there will be a surge of vaccination rates once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration grants full approval of the COVID vaccines.
In fact, he expects a "flood" of vaccine mandates as soon as FDA grants full approval to the three COVID vaccines currently authorized for emergency use: Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Janssen or Johnson & Johnson.
Dr. Fauci told USA Today, "Organizations, enterprises, universities, colleges that have been reluctant to mandate at the local level will feel much more confident" in requiring people to get the vaccine before providing them with a service.
He said, "They can say: 'If you want to come to this college or this university, you've got to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this plant, you have to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this enterprise, you've got to get vaccinated. If you want to work in this hospital, you've got to get vaccinated.'"
The 80 year old infectious diseases expert added that he predicts no more lockdowns in the future of the U.S. because there will be a significantly lower number of people getting critically sick from COVID, unlike last year when the vaccine did not exist yet and people were left vulnerable against the disease. As of this week, more than 70% of adult Americans have gotten at least one dose of the COVID vaccine.
Dr. Fauci added that "This is a dystopian world we're living in" because the public is "being misled" with misinformation about the COVID vaccines. The Blaze reported that according to recent surveys, a significant portion of vaccine hesitancy comes from the fact that the FDA has not yet given full authorization to all three vaccines yet. But Dr. Fauci and President Joe Biden are confident that the FDA will grant full authorization to Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Janssen very soon.
"I hope that it will be within the next few weeks. I hope it's within the month of August," Dr. Fauci told CNBC. "If that's the case, you're going to see the empowerment of local enterprises, giving mandates that could be colleges, universities, places of business, a whole variety and I strongly support that."
For now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has rescinded its May guidelines on masks and has ordered everyone, vaccinated or not, to put their masks back on in the face of the spreading delta variant of COVID.
As for vaccine mandates, Dr. Fauci said that "the time has come" for everyone to get vaccinated against COVID. He argued, "We've got to go the extra step to get people vaccinated."
United Airlines is the first of U.S. airlines to mandate all of its employees to be fully vaccinated by October 25 or five weeks following FDA's full approval of the COVID vaccines, whichever date comes first.
