Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, president Biden’s chief medical adviser to Covid-19, said on Sunday that in a year’s, Americans might still wear masks outside their homes, even though he predicted that the country would return to a significant degree of normalcy. will return ”. “Falling through.
“I want it to drop to a baseline that is so low that there is virtually no threat,” said Dr. Fauci said on the CNN program ‘State of the Union’, referring to the number of cases at the national level that would make him comfortable enough to stop recommending universal masking. ‘If you agree to have most people vaccinated in the country, and to get the level of virus in the community very, very low, then I believe you will be able to say for the most part that we do not necessarily have to wear masks . ”
Dr. Fauci appeared in a series of TV news programs on Sunday morning where he was asked about the dangers of the coronavirus variant, the vaccination schedule of the country and when vaccination will enable more students to return to schools.
On this last question, dr. Fauci said on Fox News Sunday that he hopes high school students, many of whom are less likely to return to the classroom than younger children, will be eligible in the fall.
“That’s why we are working for the studies to get it vaccinated,” he said of teens currently undergoing clinical trials by Pfizer and Moderna. ‘It will probably take place in the autumn; I can not say that it will be on the first day when school starts in the fall period. ”
However, vaccinations for younger children are unlikely to be available before the start of the first term of 2022, said Dr. Fauci said.
On the much-discussed question of whether people should wait longer than the recommended three or four weeks to get a vaccine, or even skip the second dose, dr. Fauci said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that it is wise for people to do this. adhere to the prescribed schedule.
“There are enough unknowns in it, especially the durability of the protection,” he said.
He added that although new data suggesting that people who had Covid had enough protection at one dose could “be really impressive”, it might be complicated to document who had the virus.
He also deals with the topic of the mutated variant of the coronavirus identified in South Africa. In clinical trials with the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine in that country, vaccinated patients were not protected against mild to moderate diseases caused by the variant known as B. 1.351. Dr. Fauci said on Fox News Sunday that, although it is still rare in the United States, “if we are more dominant, we may need a version of the vaccine that is specifically effective against it.”
While the United States is expected to surpass 500,000 deaths due to Covid-19 in the coming days, Dr. Fauci told Chuck Todd on ‘Meet the Press’ that ‘we haven’t seen anything like this for over 100 years,’ the flu pandemic of 1918, adding: ‘People will talk about these decades and decades and decades from now.’