Biden pushes harder for masks, vaccines amid surge of US COVID-19 cases

The administration is "slowly tiptoeing" toward vaccine mandates, "with Joe Biden tacitly approving the New York mandate that you have to be vaccinated to even eat at a restaurant," McEnany said on Fox News.

She called such moves "ridiculous" and "dictatorial."

Colleen Dudley, an office manager in the US state of New Jersey in her 50s, told Xinhua that mask mandates should not come from the federal government.

"It should be up to the state health departments," she said.

As of Saturday afternoon, more than 616,000 Americans have died since the virus hit the United States, and 35.7 million have been infected, showed a tally by the Johns Hopkins University.