Fauci Says Covid Guidelines Could Get Worse: ‘We May Need to Be More Restrictive’

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Friday advised that Covid-19 practices may need to become “more restrictive.”

He made the comment in a morning CNBC interview after host Andrew Ross Sorkin said New York City’s positivity rate for Covid-19 could cross 30 percent as a result of the contagion’s omicron strand.

“You’ve got to just take things one step at a time and take a look at how things evolve,” Fauci said. “I mean, obviously, if you are vaccinated, your family’s vaccinated, you have friends who are vaccinated and hopefully also boosted, you can still enjoy a social gathering generally in a home. You’ve gotta be careful when you go into large public indoor spaces where there are a lot of people there. And that’s the reason why you should be wearing a mask under those circumstances.

“If the counts keep going up and the test positivity keeps going up, we may need to be more restrictive,” he added. “But for right now, people who are vaccinated and boosted should feel reasonably comfortable. The risk was never zero.”

A Columbia University study published this week found the Omicron variant “markedly resistant” to Covid-19 vaccines on the market. “It is not too far-fetched to think that this is now only a mutation or two away from being pan-resistant to current antibodies,” wrote the study’s 20 co-authors. “We must devise strategies that anticipate the evolutional direction of the virus and develop agents that target better conserved viral elements.”

The centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meanwhile, on Thursday advised that Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine should be a last resort for patients after reports that it can trigger a blood clotting disorder, which was linked to at least nine deaths in the United States in 2020.

Watch above via CNBC.