President Joe Biden spoke out on Monday to lower expectations by suggesting that Americans might be dealing with COVID-19 restrictions until “early fall.”

Biden said this when asked by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy if he was following through with his campaign promise to “shut down” the virus.

“I’m going to shut down the virus, but I never said I’d do it in two months,” Biden fired back. “It’s going to take a heck of a lot of time.”

The president went on to say that it would would take much longer to completely get rid of the restrictive stage of the pandemic, pointing out that most vaccinations take two shots per person spread apart for three weeks.

“We’re still going to be dealing with this issue in the early fall,” Biden said. “We’re in this for a while.”

Not stopping there, Biden blamed the current situation on the “mass disregard” of Americans ignoring health officials telling them wearing masks and practice social distancing. He also predicted that there would be 660,000 deaths from the virus before we turn the corner on it.

“It’s beginning to move in the right direction,” Biden said.

Taking a more positive tone, Biden added that vaccines will be available for all in the spring,

“I think we will be able to do that this spring,” Biden said. “But it is going to be a logistical challenge that exceeds anything we have ever tried in this country, but I think we can do that.”

He went on to say that “we are going to be well on our way to herd immunity and increasing the access for people who aren’t first on the list and going all the way down the children.”

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“I feel good about where we’re going, and I think we can get it done,” Biden concluded.

Biden and his fellow Democrats have been critical from the start about how Donald Trump handled this pandemic. It remains to be seen if he will be able to handle it any better.