Fauci Knocks ‘Inexplicable’ Decision to Roll Back Covid Restrictions: ‘Now’s the Time to Really Crush This’ With Vaccines Plus Mitigation

President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser on the Covid pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, spoke out against two Republican governors’ decisions to abruptly end all Covid restrictions in their state, despite an ongoing, elevated caseload across the country and with the nationwide vaccine rollout still in its early stages.

Appearing on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront, Fauci echoed Biden’s scathing critique of the moves (the president called them “neanderthal thinking”). On Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) had proudly announced that he was ending all mask mandates and social distancing restrictions as of next week, saying “It is now time to open Texas 100%.” Mississippi’s Republican Gov. Tate Reeves‘ made a similar announcement shortly thereafter on Monday, rolling back all pandemic mitigation measures in his state as of today.

“I don’t know why they’re doing it, but it’s certainly from a public health standpoint ill advised,” Fauci told host Erin Burnett. “The curves of the the diminution of infections that are going down, it’s reached the point where, the last seven days, it plateaued. We’ve been to the scene before months and months ago when we tried to open up the country and the economy when certain states did not abide by the guidelines we had rebounds which were very troublesome. What we don’t need right now is another surge, so just pulling back on all of the public health guidelines that we know work — and if you take a look at the curve, we know it works. It’s just inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”

Fauci then pointed out that the country is still recording anywhere from 55,00o to 75,000 new coronavirus cases every day, a level of infection that prompted many states, like Texas, to reimpose mask mandates and social distancing rules this past summer after relaxing them in the late spring.

Burnett then played a clip of Texas Sen. John Cornyn who shot back at Biden’s “neanderthal” comment by clearly implying mask mandates and distancing restrictions weren’t based on actual public health research and were instead merely “arbitrary.”

“First of all, they’re not arbitrary. They’re based on evidence and data from science,” Fauci reiterated. “We know that these interventions work. It’s very clear. When you implement them, you see the cases go down. When you pull back, the cases go up. What you want to do is get down to a low enough baseline so that when you do pull back on the public health measures, that you won’t have a surge because when you have a level of virus that’s low enough as you get these little blips, you can contain them. In addition, we have every single day that goes by, every week, we get more and more people vaccinated. So now is not the time to pull back. Now’s the time to really crush this by doing both public health measures and accelerating the vaccinations like we’re doing.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.