When we get the level of infection in this country low enough that it is not a really high threat.

Anthony Fauci

In many areas of the country, the hospital beds are stretched. People are running out of beds, running out of trained personnel who are exhausted right now, that's real. that's not fake. That's real.

We've got to do much better.

But if you look at the last 72 hours, there's been about 1.5 million administered into people's arms, which is an average of about 500,000 a day.

All you need to do ...is to go into the trenches, go into the hospitals, go into the intensive care units and see what is happening, those are real numbers, real people and real deaths.

We have a hard struggle still ahead of us for weeks and months because we face a new variant of the disease that requires a new vigilance, but as the sun rises tomorrow on 2021, we have the certainty of those vaccines. I believe 2021 is, above all, the year when we will eventually do those everyday things that now seem lost in the past, bathed in a rosy glow of nostalgia -- going to the pub, concerts, theaters, restaurants, or simply holding hands with our loved ones in the normal way.

I still think, if done properly, you can do a single dose, reserve doses for the second dose, and still get the job done.

You can make an argument, and some people are, about stretching out the doses by giving a single dose across the board, and hoping you’re going to get the second dose in time to give to individuals.

We were hoping that as we ended December 31, we will have had 20 million doses in the arms of individuals and obviously from thenumbers thats not the case. What we hope is they will now be gaining momentum as we catch up with this, whenever you have a very large operation, such as trying to vaccinate an entire country with a new vaccine, there always will be bumps in the road and hiccups about that.

By the time we get to the early fall, we will have enough good herd immunity to be able to really get back to some strong semblance of normality - schools, theaters, sports events, restaurants.

I'm pretty confident that as we gain more and more momentum, as we transition from December to January and then February to March, I believe we will catch up with the projection.

Weve got to be doing a lot of community engagement and community outreach to get people to understand the two things that bother people, they say, Well, maybe we did this too quickly, they need to understand the speed is really a reflection of the extraordinary scientific advances that have been made that allowed us to do things in weeks to months that normally wouldve taken several years.

We're starting to see infections that are emerging from what otherwise seem like benign settings.

The more and more people that get vaccinated, the less and less the threat is, whether you get to the point if you have an overwhelming majority of people vaccinated and you have a good umbrella of herd immunity, you can get back to as close to normal as you want.

We have to make sure there's not a Christmas and holiday surge on top of that, that's in our hands to stop these numbers from climbing, these( hospital) beds from disappearing, and these lives from being ended.

I would project by the time you get to April, it will be...' open season,' in the sense of anyone, even the non-high-priority groups, could get vaccinated.

We want to make this eventually so it's as much like getting Anthony Fauci flu vaccine as possible.

I don't believe we're going to be able to throw the masks away and forget about physical separation in congregate settings for a while, probably likely until we get into the late fall and early next winter, but I think we can do it.

If enough Americans get this vaccine, you'll all forget who I am, that's my goal : To have zero name recognition with Americans. That would mean I did my job well.

We're going to be asking people to do something that is difficult and maybe even painful, particularly at the family level, is to tell people, unless it's absolutely necessary, not to travel, we said that over Thanksgiving and we're saying the same thing over Christmas.

Without substantial mitigation, the middle of January can be a really dark time for us.