'Too premature' for US to relax COVID-19 restrictions: Dr. Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, has warned that it is “too premature” to relax restrictions put in place to mitigate the spread of coronavirus in the United States.

“It’s really too premature right now to be pulling back too much,” Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, said during an appearance on NBC's “Meet the Press” on Sunday.

“When you start to see a decline in the number of cases, if you prematurely lift the restrictions, we have a few examples of the rebound back,” he added.

Fauci’s remarks come as a number of states have begun to roll back or relax some of their COVID-19 mitigation efforts.

The top expert said that while the 70,000 daily new case count in the United States is certainly down from the more than 300,000 daily cases at the height of the pandemic, but the current baseline is still too high.

“We understand the need and the desire, understandably, to want to just pull back because things are going in the right direction,” he continued. “But you've got to get that baseline down lower than it is now, particularly in light of the fact that we have some worrisome variants that are in places like California and New York and others that we're keeping our eye on.”

Fauci also on Sunday urged Americans to take any vaccine available to them.

“All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that's most available to them,” he said, referring to vaccines manufactured by Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson and approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Fauci estimated that between 70 percent and 85 percent of the US population would have to be inoculated before true “herd immunity” can materialize in the country.

Speaking on CNN's “State of the Union” on Sunday, Fauci said that Americans “need to take seriously” the new variants of the COVID-19, including the New York and South African strains.

However, he said people should not worry about whether any of the approved vaccines are effective against the new variants.

“When you get a variant that diminishes the capability of the vaccine, when you get a good vaccine...you cannot necessarily get the get the best possible response, but it's still within the cushion of effectiveness,” he said.

The US, which is still the world’s most affected country by the pandemic, continues to roll out COVID-19 vaccines to high-risk groups of Americans.

Biden urges Americans to 'please take vaccines' as storms hinder inoculation campaign

The freezing cold has handled Biden’s inoculation program its first major setback amid concerns among some Americans about the safety of the vaccines.

The Biden administration is trying to speed up its ambitious inoculation campaign to vaccinate most American adults as local governments scramble to get more doses to contain the virus.

Visiting a Pfizer factory making COVID-19 vaccines early in the week, President Biden reassured Americans that the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and urged them to “please” take the shots.

More than 28 million people have been infected with COVID-19, which has led to more than 512,000 deaths in America.

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