Dr. Anthony Fauci backtracked on Monday after telling CBS’s Face the Nation a day earlier that it was “too soon to tell” whether families could gather for Christmas this year amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“I also said something over the weekend that was taken completely out of context,” Fauci said in an appearance on CNN. “I was asked, what can we predict for this winter like December and Christmas…I said we don’t know, because we’ve seen slopes that went down.”
Just one day after saying that it's "too soon to tell" if families can gather for Christmas, Dr. Fauci flip flops once again:
“I will be spending Christmas with my family. I encourage people — to have a good, normal Christmas with your family.” pic.twitter.com/j3EcrgNbEz
— X Strategies LLC (@XStrategiesLLC) October 4, 2021
Fauci added, “The best way to ensure 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.”
On Sunday, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan asked Fauci, “But we can gather for Christmas or it’s just too soon to tell?”
“You know, Margaret, it’s just too soon to tell,” Fauci answered. “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.”
Fauci urged Americans who have not received a coronavirus vaccine to obtain one, in order to help drive down spread of the illness going into the winter. As of Monday, 76 percent of Americans ages 12 and up have received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, while 65 percent in the same age group are fully vaccinated, according to data compiled by the New York Times.