It’s not over yet
Their faces in lights... Fauci says Trump could help if he endorses vax
Americans shouldn’t let their guard down despite more COVID vaccines being distributed, the country’s top infectious disease expert warned Sunday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, pointed to possible warning signs from Europe, which “always seems to be a few steps ahead of us” in terms of the unfolding of the pandemic.
“They thought they were home free, and they weren’t, and now they are seeing cases going up,” he said.
Republican leaders who won’t get the shots or don’t speak up in favor of vaccines aren’t helping, he added.
“I’m very surprised by the number of Republicans who say they won’t get vaccinated,” he said. “I just don’t get it.”
It would “make all the difference in the world” if former President Donald Trump, who continues to enthrall a wide swath of the GOP, were to voice support of vaccines, he said.
Both the former president and his wife, Melania Trump, contracted COVID last year, and both got vaccinations before leaving the White House in January.
A March poll found 47% of Trump voters didn’t plan to get vaccinated, with 58% of people who voted for President Biden saying they would.
“The numbers ... are so disturbing, how such a large proportion of a certain group of people ... would not want to get vaccinated merely because of political consideration,” Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Nationwide, new COVID cases have been going down, although the death toll remains high — about 1,500 per day as of Sunday — a year after the first COVID death was announced in New York City, and more than 534,000 Americans have died of the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Toward the end of last week, the city’s average positivity rate was 6.45%, down from highs around 10% through the holidays, according to the city Health Department.
“We’ve not seen a lot of reinfection,” Mayor de Blasio said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“It is something our health team has studied carefully.”
He went on the defensive when asked why he had encouraged New Yorkers to keep going about their daily lives as late as midMarch 2020.
“We were trying to make sure we were working on the best health evidence, also protecting children who needed to be in school,” he said.
Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen sounded an optimistic note on jobs, saying the nation could return to full employment next year if it defeats coronavirus.
“I believe there’s enough support in this package to relieve suffering and to get the economy quickly back on track,” she said of the recently passed $1.9 trillion stimulus package.
“I’m hopeful that, if we defeat the pandemic, that we can have the economy back near full employment next year,” she added in an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
The stimulus package signed by President Biden last week, aimed at quashing the pandemic and reviving the economy, features stimulus checks, increased unemployment benefits and aid for businesses, states and vaccination efforts.
Yellen said the sweeping measures are geared toward some of the most pressing challenges the White House hopes to tackle more than a year after the World Health Organization declared the COVID outbreak a pandemic.
“We have 22 million Americans who say they don’t have enough to eat,” she said. “There’s additional money for food stamps.”
The unemployment rate was 6.2% as of February, when the economy added 379,000 jobs. But jobs were still down by about 9.5 million compared with prepandemic levels in February 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.