President Joe Biden will go through with his plan to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner “in a safe way,” press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday.

Saturday’s dinner marks the first time the event has been held in person since 2019. Biden’s decision comes amid a prolonged wave of senior administration officials contracting COVID-19 in recent weeks, including Vice President Kamala Harris just days prior.

“He has made the decision. He wants to attend, in a safe way, the White House Correspondents’ dinner to showcase his support for the free press, for the work of all of you, for the work of your colleagues around the world, to not only share accurate information about COVID but also report on the war in Ukraine, and all of the work that happens every single day,”

Jen Psaki told reporters at Wednesday’s White House briefing. “That stands in stark contrast to his predecessor, who not only questioned the legitimacy of the press on a nearly daily basis but also never attended the dinner, I don’t believe.”

Though the dinner has testing and vaccine requirements, Psaki suggested that the president will take “additional precautions and steps,” such as wearing a mask “when he’s not speaking.”

She added that Biden will not attend the dinner itself, only the presentation of scholarships and various performances.

“He will be on the menu, as he likes to say when Trevor Noah is speaking,” Psaki joked. “Just like anything, it’s a risk assessment and a decision he made on a personal basis.”

Biden’s attendance puts him at odds with his chief medical adviser, Dr. Anthony Fauci, on the subject. Fauci told CBS on Tuesday that he would not attend the dinner over coronavirus concerns.

Fauci would go on to declare during an interview on Wednesday that the U.S. had moved out of the “pandemic” phase of handling COVID-19.

Psaki declined to comment on Fauci’s decision to skip the dinner but called Fauci’s remarks from earlier in the day “absolutely true” and stated that “there’s no question that we’re in a moment, a different moment, in our fight against COVID.”

“Last month, the president announced a plan for how we can move forward safely while staying on our front foot against COVID,” she continued. “As he pointed out, nationwide cases are relatively low, far below the 900,000 cases a day we saw during the omicron surge, and even as we’ve seen, upticks, hospitalizations are at about the lowest level since the pandemic and deaths are declining.