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WASHINGTON (REUTERS) – President-elect Joe Biden has asked top U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci to continue in his work and serve as Biden’s chief medical adviser and on the Covid-19 team after Let Biden take office on January 20, Mr. Biden said on Thursday (December 3).
Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, spoke with Biden and his team preparing to deal with the virus Thursday, Biden said in an interview with CNN.
“I asked him to stay in exactly the same role that he had during the past presidents, and I asked him to also be my chief medical adviser and to be part of the Covid team,” Biden said.
Biden also said that he would receive the Covid-19 vaccine when Dr. Fauci says it is safe and he would be happy to take it publicly. “It is important to communicate to the American people that it is safe to do so,” he said.
Despite news that virus vaccines may begin shipping in the coming weeks, the United States is experiencing a further increase in hospitalizations and deaths.
The daily death toll reached its second highest level in the pandemic on Wednesday with 2,811 lives lost, according to a Reuters tally.
Biden told CNN that once in office he would issue a standing order that Americans must wear masks in federal buildings and on interstate transportation, such as planes and buses.
“I’m going to ask the public for 100 days to mask,” Biden said. “Not forever, 100 days.”
Separately, Dr Fauci apologized Thursday for questioning the rigor of British regulators who approved Pfizer Inc’s vaccine against Covid-19, saying he had faith in the quality of its work.
Britain announced approval of the vaccine on Wednesday, and the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said it had rigorously evaluated the vaccine data and spared no effort.
It gave the UK the leap in the race to begin mass inoculation against a virus that has killed nearly 1.5 million people worldwide and hit the global economy.
Regulators in the US and the European Union are examining the same test data for the Pfizer vaccine, but have not yet given approval.
In a CBS interview on Thursday, Dr Fauci suggested that British regulators had not analyzed the data carefully enough and had passed up the vaccine, comments that were prominently reported on major British television news channels.
He later gave an interview to the BBC in which he said his earlier comments had gone wrong.
“There really has been a misunderstanding, and for that I am sorry, and I apologize for that,” he said. “I have a lot of faith in both the scientific community and the UK regulatory community,” said Dr Fauci.
“I didn’t want to apply any oversight (to the UK regulatory process), even though it came out that way,” he added.
Dr Fauci said that the point he had been trying to make was that in the American context, with widespread skepticism about vaccines, it would not have been appropriate to carry out the process in the same way and at the same speed that happened in Great Britain. Brittany.
“If, for example, we had approved it yesterday or tomorrow, there would probably have been a setback in a society that it was already scrutinizing,” he said.
“You know, at the end of the day, it will be safe, it will be effective, people in the UK will receive it and it will do very well, and people in the United States are going to receive it and we are going to do quite well,” he said. Dr. Fauci.
In response to its earlier criticisms, the MHRA issued a statement saying that it had “rigorously evaluated the data in the shortest time possible without compromising the thoroughness of our review.”
The regulator also said that its emergency approval had allowed “some stages of this process to happen in parallel to condense the necessary time, but it does not mean that the steps and the expected standards of safety, quality and efficacy have been overlooked.”
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