WASHINGTON D.C.: President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said this week that Americans should gather with their loved ones for the Christmas holidays this year, after stating just a day earlier that it was “too soon” to tell.

“I will be spending Christmas with my family. I encourage people, particularly vaccinated people who are protected, to have a good, normal Christmas with your family,” said Fauci, who is the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to CNN.

Earlier, on Sunday, CBS News’ “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan asked him whether “we can gather for Christmas, or is it just too soon to tell?”

“You know Margaret, it is just too soon to tell. We have just got to concentrate on continuing to get those numbers down and not try to jump ahead by weeks or months and say what we are going to do at a particular time,” Fauci responded.

His comments caused an uproar on social media.

Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul tweeted, “I do not think anyone is going to be listening to Scrooge Fauci. I know I won’t be.”

“Fauci has lost all credibility with the American people. We are not waiting on his permission to celebrate Christmas together,” added Republican New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik.

In response, Fauci claimed, on Monday, his comments from the previous day were “taken completely out of context.”

“I was asked, ‘What could we predict for this winter for like December and Christmas? I said, ‘We do not know because we have seen slopes that went down and then came back up. The best way to assure that we will be in good shape as we get into the winter would be to get more and more people vaccinated.’ That was misinterpreted as me saying we cannot spend Christmas with our families, which was absolutely not the case,” he stressed.