(Adds background, quotes) Nov 10 (Reuters) - San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank President Mary Daly on Wednesday said she expects high inflation to moderate once COVID-19 recedes, and repeated that it would be “quite premature” to raise rates now or even to speed up the Fed’s bond-buying taper. “Uncertainty requires us to wait and watch with vigilance,” Daly said in an interview on Bloomberg TV. In a nod to the economic progress made since the first COVID-19 vaccinations were rolled out late last year, the Fed last week began trimming its monthly bond purchases in a tapering process expected to take until the middle of next year. Any interest rate hikes would be expected to start after the bond-buying winddown is complete, with the slightly majority of Fed policymakers as of September believing that they should not begin before 2023. That timeframe is drawing criticism from some quarters for potentially putting the U.S. central bank behind the curve on fighting inflation. U.S. consumer prices rose 6.2% in October compared to a year earlier, the fastest annual rate in 31 years, a government report showed earlier in the day. That is high inflation, Daly said, and painful, but it is being driven by supply-chain bottlenecks and high consumer demand for goods that will pass as COVID-19 fades. Similarly, the labor supply is constrained due to COVID-19 fears and impact. Fed monetary policy cannot affect supply-side issues, Daly said, and if it tightens policy now that could actually raise the cost of investments and actually slow progress on addressing bottleneck issues. (Reporting by Ann Saphir, Editing by Nick Zieminski and AListair Bell)