Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan discussed his outlook for the economy, the prospect for vaccines accelerating a recovery in 2021 and potential changes to the Fed’s asset purchases in a phone interview with Wall Street Journal reporter Nick Timiraos on Tuesday, Dec. 1. Here is a partial transcript of the interview, lightly edited for clarity and length.

WSJ: Do you think we are in a self-sustaining recovery now?

MR. KAPLAN: We’re in a recovery. It’s going to need a vaccine and wide dissemination of a vaccine to propel it from here. The next three to six months are somewhat unpredictable because we’ve got a significant resurgence of the virus. And I’m hopeful that the resurgence is going to be more muted, but at the moment, the number of cases and hospitalizations are continuing to increase. That’s a threat we’re going to have to weather over the next three to six months.

Beyond that, as we start vaccinating the population, starting with health-care workers and the broader population, I’m optimistic we’ll have a strong year of growth next year. It just may be more weighted to the latter half or three quarters of next year. I’m more uncertain about the next three to six months.

WSJ: To the extent there’s a bimodal outlook, and you have some higher probability that you’re actually going to get both the not-so-good case followed by the better case, almost back to back—as a policy maker, how do you calibrate appropriate policy, especially monetary policy, for a potentially head-spinning sequence of events?