Powell Says Pandemic Still Poses Considerable Downside Risks

Q: How are you factoring in vaccine rollouts in forecasts, and have you and others on FOMC been vaccinated?

• - A: We see what everyone else sees: we're vaccinating people at a rate of a million a day and will take awhile to get to number experts say will get to herd immunity.
• "We think it will be a struggle." We said the pandemic still provides considerable downside risks to the economy, and the slowness of the rollout is one of the reasons why.
• The other reason is the arrival of new virus strains, we don't know how to model that. We can have a base case, but we realize that no one knows how this new vaccine will roll out, how successful it will be, how high it will be able to drive vaccinations and those sort of things.
• We set policy so that we're going to remain accommodative until we see improvement in the economy, and not just in the outlook - in the data. So that's how we think about that. And I would also add, there's nothing more important to the economy now than people getting vaccinated.
• Powell says he's been vaccinated once and expects to get his second sometime soon.