Pile enough mandates upon Americans and they will do as they are told, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke to CNN’s Jen Christensen on Sunday.
The White House’s chief medical adviser said the spread of the delta variant of COVID-19 is the fault of those who do not listen to experts such as himself.
Fauci said part of the solution to reducing the virus’ spread is for Americans to rely on what he called “trusted public messengers who put aside political ideologies and convince people to get vaccinated.”
The alternative is for them to be forced to do as they are told, he said.
“The other way to do it is to have many, many more mandates,” Fauci said.
“I know that rankles a lot of people,” he told Christensen, “but you’re going to see situations locally — I don’t think you’re going to see centrally derived mandates — but there are going to be mandates where colleges, universities, places of business, large corporations, they’re going to say, ‘If you want to come work for us, you’ve got to be vaccinated.’
“I believe that’s going to turn this around, because I don’t think people are going to want to not go to work or not go to college or not go to a university. They’re going to do it.
“You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives,” he said.
Last week, President Joe Biden said he would use his rule-making powers to force businesses with more than 100 workers to institute vaccine mandates. Fauci said the administration had to act because of one group.
“We have a really unfortunate situation that we have a pretty hardcore group of people that we’re trying to persuade them — or mandate them, if they’re not persuaded — to get vaccinated,” Fauci said.
He estimated that about 75 million Americans are eligible for vaccinations but have not yet gotten the shots.
“That’s the key to ending this. I mean, that would be the key,” Fauci said, calling those who have decided against the vaccine a “recalcitrant group.”
“We have the tools to end this and yet we’re not doing it,” he said.
Fauci, who has been criticized for hiding the full story of whether funds he controlled were steered to a Wuhan lab that could be the source of the coronavirus outbreak, said the reasons for the rejection of the vaccine were “inexplicable.”
“People because of their political bent feel that they don’t want to be told to mask up and they don’t want to be told to get vaccinated,” he said.
Fauci said it was “inexplicable … to have people, because of the divisiveness in society, not wanting to contribute to the solution and by doing that they become part of the problem. But that is, again, the way it is, unfortunately.”
