Removing the mandate on wearing face masks on airplanes? It's out of the question says Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In fact, Fauci - the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who also serves as the Chief Medical Advisor to The White House - hinted that a vaccine mandate for people who want to travel by air could work.
"A vaccine requirement for a person getting on the plane is just another level of getting people to have a mechanism that would spur them to get vaccinated; namely, you can't get on a plane unless you're vaccinated, which is just another one of the ways of getting requirements, whatever that might be," Fauci said.
Fauci made his comments on ABC's This Week on Sunday program, according to Fox News.
The idea of a vaccine mandate to be able to travel by plane has been debated for some time now and is controversial, to say the least, given the continued criticism of the face mask mandate.
President Biden said earlier this month he did not see the need to mandate a vaccine to fly.
The Federal Aviation Administration said last week that more than 80 percent of the reports of physical and verbal confrontations on planes have been related to wearing a face mask.
Fauci did not address the unprecedented level of violence but did say that removing the mask mandate is out of the question for now.
"I think the idea of taking masks off, in my mind, is really not something we should even be considering," he said. "I think when you're dealing with a closed space, even though the filtration is good, that you want to go that extra step. Even though you have a good filtration system, I still believe that masks are a prudent thing to do and we should be doing it."
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