Concerned about catching COVID-19 from your family over the holidays? Dr. Anthony Fauci has a suggestion: make your own vaccine mandate before hosting or joining a party this season.
Fauci – who serves as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President – recommended that people “essentially ask and maybe require that people show evidence that they are vaccinated, or give their honest and good faith word that they have been vaccinated,” in a Dec. 8 interview with the Washington Post.
He told senior writer Frances Stead Sellars that people should feel comfortable with their families over the holidays if they are fully vaccinated.
Those who are eligible for booster shots should also get them, according to the doctor.
“When you get vaccinated and you have a vaccinated group and you are in an indoor setting, you can enjoy, as we have traditionally over the years, dinners and gatherings within the home with people who are vaccinated,” he said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 28.5 percent of Americans – more than 60 million people – had still not received even one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine as of Thursday.
Vaccines can prevent infection with COVID-19 and decrease the chance of severe cases, hospitalization and death. While the CDC and Fauci recommend that anyone eligible to get a vaccine get one, some people in the U.S. are opposed to getting vaccinated. For example, one Facebook group called “Anti Covid 19 Vaccine” had more than 1,500 members as of Friday.
Some Republican lawmakers have opposed vaccine mandates. Last week Slate reported that Republican-led states were even passing legislation to help vaccine refusers.
“You know, Frances, we – no one likes to be mandating for people to do things that they might be hesitant to do,” said Fauci during The Washington Post interview. “But quite frankly, you have to, when you're in the middle of what we call a historic experience of the worst pandemic of a respiratory disease in the last hundred years. We have to put the communal responsibility ahead of individual preferences.”
This week, an injectable monoclonal antibody cocktail became the first treatment of its kind approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for prevention of COVID-19 before exposure. Testing is underway to determine if it protects against the recently identified omicron variant of COVID-19, which has more than 50 mutations and is more transmissible than other variants.
With omicron cases detected in more than a dozen states, vaccines are still an important prevention tool, according to Fauci. Even the FDA said the monoclonal antibody cocktail should only be sought instead of a vaccine for people with conditions that makes vaccination particularly risky.
“So, although no one, myself included, likes to be told what you have to do, sometimes if you don’t come to the realization that it is good for yourself, for your family, and for the communal good, then mandates or requirements become necessary,” he said.
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