Dr. Anthony Fauci said he is hopeful that U.S. citizens will be able to head to the polls in November as they would in any other past election, but with the uncertainty of how the Wuhan coronavirus could “rebound,” the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said he couldn’t “guarantee it.”
The answer came after CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Fauci whether people would be able to “physically” vote.
“I hope so, Jake,” he responded. “I can’t guarantee it. I believe that if we have a good, measured way of rolling into this, steps towards normality, that we hope by the time we get to November that we’ll be able to do it in a way which is the standard way. However, and I don’t want to be the pessimistic person, there is always the possibility, as we get into next fall and the beginning of early winter, that we could see a rebound. And hopefully, hopefully, what we’ve gone through now, and the capability that we have, for much, much better testing capability, much, much better serosurveillance capability, and the ability to respond with countermeasures, with drugs that work, that it will be an entirely different ball game.”
Fauci said he hopes a rebound doesn’t occur but that he’s a realist and we have to be prepared. “Hopefully we’ll be able to respond to that rebound in a much more effective way than what we see now in January, February, March,” he said.
VIDEO - Dr. Fauci: ‘I Hope’ Voters Will Be Able to Physically Go to the Polls in November https://t.co/mx46ifHUBj
— Grabien (@GrabienMedia) April 12, 2020
The exchange comes as Democrats have been pushing mail-in voting.
President Trump has denounced that type of voting, however, as being rife with cheating.
“I think a lot of people cheat with mail in voting. I think people should vote with ID, voter ID. I think voter ID is very important and the reason they don’t want voter ID is because they intend to cheat,” he said at a recent press briefing. “It should be you go to a booth and you proudly display yourself. You don’t send it in the mail where people pick up. All sorts of bad things can happen by the time they sign that, if they sign that, if they sign that, by the time it gets in and it’s tabulated. No, it shouldn’t be mailed in. You should vote at the booth and you should have voter ID. Because when you have voter ID, that’s the real deal.”
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