Americans can expect travel restrictions to tighten 'if anything,' incoming CDC director says
U.S. President-elect Joe Biden's pick to lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said she will "hit the ground running" and suggested there might be more travel restrictions in store.
"We need to reset the stage here. We need to make sure the country, the people understand that this pandemic is now going to be addressed with science, with trust, with transparency, with communication of exactly where we are to the American people," Dr. Rochelle Walensky told ABC News chief anchor George Stephanopoulos in an interview Tuesday on "Good Morning America."
Walensky, the chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, will be sworn in Wednesday as director of the CDC -- an appointment that does not require Senate confirmation.
"I will be sworn in tomorrow, but the work has been happening since I was named," Walensky said, "and we've been working really hard to make sure we can come in and hit the ground running and make sure that we can get this country back to health."
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Walensky said the incoming administration's plan to vaccinate 100 million people against COVID-19 within the first 100 days of Biden's presidency is "really ambitious but doable." The key is making sure there are enough people on the ground to administer the vaccines, understanding the supply and how many doses are going to which states, and making vaccines accessible to all people.
"All of that plan is underpinned with equity," Walensky said. "We need to make sure that we're equally and equitably getting the vaccine across this country."
In one of his last orders, outgoing President Donald Trump announced Monday night that he was rescinding entry bans imposed because of the coronavirus pandemic on most visitors from Brazil, the United Kingdom and much of Europe effective Jan. 26. However, Biden's incoming White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said the new administration won't be lifting the bans.
Walensky agreed with the move to reject Trump's proclamation and said there may be more travel restrictions introduced.
"If you look at the fatalities of 400,000 that we're likely to hit today, if you look at our cases across this country, I don't think now is the time to encourage people to get on international fights, to encourage people to mobilize," Walensky said. "I think now is the time to really buckle down, double down our efforts. And so I don't expect that we'll be lifting travel restrictions and, if anything, I think we can expect that they might tighten, especially in the context of variants that we're hearing about."