NEW YORK (1010 WINS) – Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that "the time has come" for vaccine mandates as he warned allowing the virus to freely circulate among the unvaccinated could lead to a variant “worse” than delta that could “evade the protection of the vaccine.”
Fauci told “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd that he hopes the FDA will give full approval to the current COVID-19 vaccines in “the next few weeks.”
“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,” Fauci said. “The time has come, because we’ve got to go the extra step to get people vaccinated.”
Fauci believes some people will get vaccinated once the vaccines get full approval, “but for those who do not want, I believe mandates at the local level need to be done.”
Fauci said people who are unvaccinated should not only think about their own health but also the “community responsibility to crush this virus before it becomes even worse.”
“If you allow the virus to freely circulate and not try to stop it, sooner or later there is a likelihood that you will get another variant that could—I’m not saying it will—that could be more problematic than the delta,” Fauci said.
“Fortunately for us the vaccines do quite well against delta, particularly in protecting you against severe disease,” he added. “But if you give the virus a chance to continue to change, you’re leading to a vulnerability that we might get a worse variant, and then that will impact not only the unvaccinated, that will impact the vaccinated, because that variant could evade the protection of the vaccine.”
Fauci said he believes booster shots will likely be necessary in the future, as data from Pfizer shows the vaccine's effectiveness "went down from the 90s, down to around 84% after a few months."
"Everyone assumes, and I think correctly, that sooner or later you're going to see an attenuation to the point where we're going to have to give an additional boost to people, very likely the elderly before you give it to otherwise normal people who are not old," Fauci said.
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