Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical advisor for Covid-19, said on Sunday that Americans could still wear masks outside their homes a year from now, even predicting that the country would return to “a significant degree of normality ”In the fall.
“I want you to continue falling to a base line so low that there is practically no threat,” said Fauci on CNN’s “State of the Union” program, referring to the number of national cases that would make him comfortable enough to stop recommending the universal masking. “If you combine the vaccination of most people in the country with obtaining a very, very low virus level in the community, then I believe that you will be able to say that, for the most part, you don’t necessarily have to wear masks. “
Dr. Fauci appeared on a series of TV news broadcasts on Sunday morning, where he was asked about the dangers of coronavirus variants, the vaccine’s distribution schedule in the country and when the vaccination would allow more students to return to schools.
On this last question, Dr. Fauci said on Fox News Sunday that he expected high school students, much less of whom returned to classrooms compared to younger children, to qualify for vaccination in the fall.
“That is why we are promoting these studies, to vaccinate them,” he said of teenagers, who are currently undergoing clinical trials by Pfizer and Moderna. “This is likely to happen in the fall; I can’t say it will be on the first day of school, in the fall. “
Vaccination for younger children, however, “is unlikely to occur until the beginning of the first quarter of 2022,” said Fauci.
On the hotly debated question of whether people should wait longer than recommended three or four weeks to receive a booster vaccine, or even skip the second dose, Dr. Fauci told NBC News “Meet the Press” that it was prudent that people follow the prescribed schedule.
“There are enough unknowns in this, particularly the durability of the protection,” he said.
He added that while the new data suggesting that people who used Covid could get enough protection with one dose was “really impressive,” it can be tricky to document who had the virus.
He also addressed the subject of the mutant coronavirus variant identified in South Africa. In clinical trials involving the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine in that country, patients who were inoculated were not protected from mild or moderate illnesses caused by the variant, known as B. 1.351 . Dr. Fauci said on Fox News Sunday that while it is still rare in the United States, “if it becomes more dominant, we may need a version of the vaccine that is specifically effective against”.
With the expectation that the United States will surpass 500,000 deaths caused by Covid-19 in the next few days, Dr. Fauci told Chuck Todd at “Meet the Press” that “we haven’t seen anything even close to that in over 100 years” since the 1918 flu pandemic, adding: “People will be talking about those decades and decades and decades from now”.