Fauci Insists He’s Not Trying to Cancel Christmas, Bashes Media for Having ‘Misinterpreted’ Him
Dr. Anthony Fauci struck back at the “disinformation” from the media coverage on his hesitant assessment of whether it will be safe for Americans to hold holiday gatherings in December.
On Sunday, Fauci appeared on CBS’ Face The Nation where he was asked if it was “too soon to tell” if it would be a good idea for people to gather together around Christmastime. Here’s how he answered the question:
It’s just too soon to tell. We’ve just got to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we’re going to do at a particular time. Let’s focus like a laser on continuing to get those cases down. And we can do it by people getting vaccinated and also in the situation where boosters are appropriate to get people boosted because we know that they can help greatly in diminishing infection and diminishing advanced disease, the kinds of data that are now accumulating in real time.
Fauci’s answer made clear that he was not able to project — that he could only offer an assessment based on the state of the pandemic in the current moment. Nonetheless, his comments were a lightning rod for conservatives who criticized the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director and promised to ignore his advice.
On Monday, Fauci appeared on CNN — and anchor Kate Bolduan asked about the coverage of the infectious disease expert’s comments. Fauci said they were “taken completely out of context.”
I said we don’t know because we’ve seen slopes that went down and then came back up. The best way to assure that we’ll be in good shape as we get into the winter would be to get more and more people vaccinated. That was misinterpreted as my saying we can’t spend Christmas with our families, which was absolutely not the case. I will be spending Christmas with my family. I encourage people, particularly the vaccinated people who are protected, to have a good, normal Christmas with your family…The way all of the other disinformation goes around, you say something talking about a landmark of a time, and it gets misinterpreted that I’m saying you can’t spend family Christmas time which is nonsense. You can.
Fauci concluded by explaining that on CBS, he was speaking to the difficulty of predicting what the pandemic will be like around Christmas when its still 80 days away.
Watch above, via CNN.
