'This Week' Transcript 12-26-21: Dr. Anthony Fauci & Dr. Ashish Jha

Dr. Anthony Fauci & Dr. Ashish Jha were on "This Week" Sunday, December 26. This is a rush transcript and may be updated.

A rush transcript of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" airing on Sunday, December 26, 2021, on ABC News is below. This copy may not be in its final form, may be updated and may contain minor transcription errors. For previous show transcripts, visit the "This Week" transcript archive.

JONATHAN KARL, "THIS WEEK" CO-ANCHOR: And we begin this morning with the president's chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci. Dr. Fauci, thank you for joining us. We just heard the details of the president's latest strategy to deal with the pandemic. Let me just ask you bottom line, what in what he announced is going to help deal with the immediate crisis, this rapid spread of Omicron?

DR. ANTHONY FAUCI, CHIEF MEDICAL ADVISER TO PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well, there are a few things. The one that would be immediate is to make sure, given the rapid spread of this extraordinary variant that we don't get an overrun on hospitals, particularly in those regions in which you have a larger proportion of unvaccinated individuals.

We want to make sure that given the sheer volume of number of cases that you see now -- every day it goes up and up, the last weekly average was about 150,000, and it likely will go much higher. The President's multi-part component of the response is to make sure that we have adequate backup for hospitals with military personnel, doctors, nurses and other health care providers, making sure that there's enough PPE and that if needed, there's enough ventilators in the national strategic stockpile. Those are the things that are immediate.