Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday advocated raising the level of his projections about herd immunity to COVID-19 – insisting that he only offered “estimates” all the time.
“We have to realize that we have to be humble and understand what we don’t know. These are pure estimates, ”Fauci told CNN anchor Dana Bash of the“ State of the Union ”.
Fauci in an interview with the New York Times last week predicted that up to 90 percent of Americans need to be vaccinated or infected to obtain collective immunity.
Citing research on COVID-19 vaccines, Fauci suggested that it go public with the new projections, in part because the country was finally ready to hear them, according to the newspaper.
But asked on Sunday why he “did not go straight to the American public to begin with”, Fauci denied that he had sweetened his predictions.
“No, actually, Dana, I don’t think it can be interpreted as being correct or not,” said the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
In Sunday’s interview, he said he now predicts the range to be somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of the population.
“The calculations I made 70, 75 percent, is an interval. The variation will be somewhere between 70 and 85 percent, ”he said.
“The reason I started saying 70, 75 percent, I increased it to 85. This is not a big leap.”
He noted that he included in the new calculation what experts know about measles, which he believes is more contagious than coronavirus.
“When you reach less than 90 percent of the measles vaccinated population, you begin to see a breakthrough against herd immunity,” he said.
“So I did a calculation that COVID-19 is not as transmissible as measles … I imagine that you would need something that you need something less than 90 percent – that’s when I reached 85,” he continued.
But when pressed about whether he was “basing his recommendation on research and what people could accept”, Fauci acknowledged it was “a little bit of that”.
“I want to encourage the people of the United States and globally to get vaccinated and so many [people] as we are vaccinated, we will come closer to collective immunity. The end result is that it is an estimate. I took a break, ”said Fauci.