‘We could crush this outbreak’ with mass vaccinations, says Dr. Anthony Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, you know, there’s politics, but there’s also divisiveness in society. That’s something that’s going to take a while to correct. Obviously, we’ve got to keep politics out of public health measures. There’s no place for that. They do nothing but interfere.

But we have a lot of work ahead of us to get the country together and pulling together in an effort to end this outbreak and just put aside things like the politicization of wearing of masks and doing other public health measures.

I think we were in this period all along. Whenever you have a global pandemic, you have to have solidarity between countries because what affects one country in one part of the world, when you’re dealing with a communicable disease that has a high degree of efficiency and transmitting from person to person, you have to have interconnectedness with regard to cooperation, collaboration and solidarity, because viruses, particularly viruses like SARS-CoV-2 that are spectacularly efficient in their ability to transmit, they don’t know borders at all. So, since they don’t know borders, we sort of have to act like we don’t know borders and we’re all in this together.

The answer is yes — just the way we have vaccinated our way out of multiple public health threats such as smallpox, polio, measles and a number of others. So when you’re dealing with communicable diseases, infectious diseases, very often the gold standard of how to really crush these outbreaks is by getting a safe and highly efficacious vaccine. We are very fortunate in that we already have two and likely we’ll have more than that — vaccines with a very high degree of efficacy. The Moderna and the Pfizer products are 94-95% efficacious.

So if we get, and I’ve made an estimate, it’s purely an estimate, about 70-85% of the population vaccinated, I believe we would have what’s called an umbrella or a blanket of herd immunity over the country. And if the rest of the world does that, we could crush this outbreak. Absolutely. Vaccine is the answer. Until we get a vaccine, we must concentrate very, very clearly on the public health measures that we talk about all the time: namely, uniform wearing of masks, keeping physical distancing, avoiding crowds in congregate settings, particularly indoors and washing your hands frequently. That should be the bridge to the vaccine. But if we can get the overwhelming majority of people vaccinated, we can put an end to this outbreak.

Well, I think there are a number of things that are going on. Right now, we are still in the very early stages. Whenever you introduce a massive program, the likes of which we’ve not had before, namely vaccinating essentially all of the country or the overwhelming majority of the country with a brand-new vaccine program, that, not surprisingly, can get off with some bumps in the road and some hiccups. Having said that, that’s not an excuse. We’ve got to do better. We must do better. What I’m saying is that let’s give it a week or so into January to see if the process can catch up with the pace that had originally been put forth.

Yes, no doubt it’s going to change because in the discussions that I’ve had in my new role of being part of the COVID[-19] team and the general public health team of the Biden group, is that we will have a much more close interaction between the federal and the state level in the sense of planning together, as well as implementation and support.

Right now, the issue that is confronting us is that we need to more efficiently get vaccines into the arms of people. We have more vaccine distributed than we’ve actually put into the arms of individuals. We need to do better with the doses we have.

From a public health repercussion, you got to get people vaccinated. It doesn’t matter who they are. If you’re in the country, you’re a threat of getting infected yourself and of transmitting the infection. So there’s no room for any withholding of vaccines for people because they’re part of the population that we’re dealing with.

Well, I don’t think so, because no one has yet gotten into this in a really large, meaningful way. This is really quite unprecedented. There have been situations that — if you go historically, not as an example of what other countries are doing, because each country is different, depending upon the size and the health system…for example, those countries that have national health services where everything is interconnected, it can generally be much easier to implement something like this. But if you go back in history and look at times when we’ve had to do mass vaccination programs, there likely could be some lessons learned there.

There is a very interesting historical story about that. In 1947, we had someone visit Mexico as a tourist and then come back to the United States having contracted smallpox in Mexico — came back to New York City, and actually infected a bunch of people. They were 12 hospitalizations and two deaths. New York City, in response to that, did a massive vaccination program. And in a three-week period, they vaccinated 6,350,000. And within two weeks, they vaccinated 5 million people just in New York City. Of note, I was a 6-year-old boy who was one of those 6,350,000 people that were vaccinated in New York. So, if New York City can vaccinate 6,350,000 people in three weeks, and that’s only one city, then we can go back and get some lessons learned, how that was done, and get it done country-wise.