Facing a barrage of questions about whether the White House supports vaccine mandates and renewed mask requirements, press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated Monday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, not President Joe Biden, is responsible for setting the country’s COVID-related guidance. 

“The president favors using the CDC as his North Star and what the health and medical experts are going to advise on how to save more lives and protect people,” Psaki said at Monday’s White House news briefing.

She did not directly answer questions about how Biden personally felt about potential new mitigation measures.

The calls for action on vaccines and masks are growing louder amid another surge in COVID-19 infections, predominantly among the unvaccinated.

Some municipalities, including Los Angeles County, California; St. Louis; and Savannah, Georgia, have reimpose public indoor mask requirements, while many others are again recommending face coverings. 

Meanwhile, more than 50 major medical groups on Monday called for vaccine mandates for U.S. health care workers, and New York City and California announced they will require government employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly tests.

The federal government has not yet imposed its own vaccine mandate, but on Monday the Department of Veterans Affairs said it will require 115,000 of its frontline workers to be inoculated within the next two months, the federal agency to do so. 

On Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, told CNN that officials have been discussing whether to recommend that the vaccinated wear masks, which would reverse guidance issued by the CDC in May. 

Psaki stressed that Biden will not be part of any decision made on that front because he wants to keep politics out of scientific guidance.

“The discussions are primarily between the health and medical experts about how we should proceed from here to address the rise in cases in a from the delta variant among unvaccinated and protect the American public,” she said.

“It would be actually surprising and odd if our health and medical experts were not having an active discussion about how to best protect the American people,” Psaki added.

When asked if Biden publicly supporting certain measures could harden the resistance among his detractors, Psaki acknowledged that is a factor the administration must weigh.

“We do not want to look at our objective of getting more people vaccinated through a political prism. We don't,” she said. “And the president certainly recognizes that he is not always the right voice to every community about the benefits of getting vaccinated, which is why we have invested as much as we have in local voices and empowering local, trusted voices.”

When asked if the White House would like to see the Food and Drug Administration move more quickly on granting full approval to vaccines — which might persuade more people to get vaccinated — or see the CDC revise its guidance in a more timely fashion, Psaki again said the administration defers to the scientists. 

“The FDA is the gold standard in our view, and they move at the speed of science,” she said. “They look at a range of data, and they make sure that when they make conclusions, and when they get full approval, they have confidence in the science and the data that backs that up. It wouldn't be responsible to expedite that process at a faster speed than the science and data allows.”

As for the CDC, Psaki reminded reporters that the agency does not enact laws and that its current guidance says that unvaccinated Americans should wear masks in indoor public places and that everyone age 12 and older should get vaccinated. 

“The most effective step we can take around the country is to get more people vaccinated,” she said. “So that is where our focus needs to be, regardless of where the CDC may or may not land on any additional guidance.”