Dr. Anthony Fauci, a key White House medical adviser, said that President Joe Biden's vaccination mandate announced Thursday is actually ''somewhat moderate.''
Mediaite reports that Fauci was speaking with CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta when he was asked about a vaccine mandate. ''I think the president is, you know, being somewhat moderate in his demand, if you want to call it that, in that there are some people who really don't want to get vaccinated, but they don't want to lose their job,'' Fauci replied.
He continued: ''You've got to give them an off lane. And the off lane is if you get tested frequently enough, and find out you're positive, you won't come to work and you won't infect other people. So it really is somewhat of a compromise there. Myself, I would make it just vaccinate or not. But he was trying to be moderate in what his pronouncement was.''
According to The Associated Press, the mandate requires all employers with more than 100 workers to have them vaccinated or tested for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid will also have to be fully vaccinated.
More than 177 million Americans are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, but confirmed cases of the virus have shot up in recent weeks. They've now reached an average of about 140,000 cases per day. On average, about 1,000 Americans are dying from the virus daily, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the AP reported Friday.
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