Can we eradicate Covid-19? Not according to US disease expert Anthony Fauci

Biden’s chief medical adviser says America’s best protection against the coronavirus is mass vaccination
According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the US is still averaging more than 88,000 daily cases and just under 400 deaths per day

Coronavirus pandemic

Tribune News Service

Published: 2:14pm, 24 Aug 2022

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Corrected [5:44am, 25 Aug, 2022]

[5:44am, 25 Aug, 2022]
Dr Anthony Fauci heads the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, as reported in an earlier version of this article.

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While Dr Anthony Fauci, who became both a reassuring and politically polarising voice during the pandemic, is retiring from public service in December, he has still got a lot to share.

In an interview with USA Today, President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases says the world might be opening up again, but that does not mean the pandemic is behind us.

“I think that when you talk about new normal, you have to focus predominantly on Covid,” said Dr Fauci. “We have the emergence of infectious diseases more often than people realise. Many of them are relatively insignificant at a global level.”

Fauci pointed to the Ebola outbreaks in West Central Africa and the Zika outbreak in Brazil, which spread to other areas on a much smaller scale than Covid-19.

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“You’ve got to put it into the context that we are still in a pandemic now that it is in its third year. When we get to January of 2023, that will be the third year anniversary of a historic pandemic in which we’ve had surprisingly, but unfortunately, tragically multiple variants in surges,” Fauci said. “That really is historic.”

Fauci has spent his career studying emerging viruses and guiding America’s response to health crises like the HIV/Aids epidemic in the 1980s and West Nile Virus.

“Could we actually eradicate Sars CoV-2, the cause of Covid? I can tell you categorically, the answer to that is going to be no. Because we’ve only eradicated from the face of the earth one significant pathogen and that’s smallpox,” says Fauci. “We did that because smallpox, when you get infected or vaccinated with it, you get immunity that lasts at least decades, and maybe lifelong, and smallpox does not vary very much. ”

Fauci says America’s best protection against Covid-19 is mass vaccination.

“For reasons we still don’t fully appreciate, the immunity that you get from prior infection, as well as from vaccination lasts literally for months to a year and not lifetime, like we see with smallpox. So we are going to have to get this virus to a low enough level that it does not disrupt the social order right now. We’re not there yet.”

According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US is still seeing an average more than 88,000 cases per day and just under 400 deaths per day.

“Now, that is what the new normal is going to be. It’s not going be an absence of Covid, it’s going to be a living with it at a low enough level that it does not disrupt us,” Fauci says.

While Fauci does not think masks in outdoor settings are necessary, he says it’s prudent to wear a mask indoors if the community has a high number of Covid-19 cases. He says more vaccinations and booster shots are the best defence against the virus.

Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease will depart the federal government in December after more than 5 decades of service. Photo: AP/File

“We are doing very poorly as a nation in getting people vaccinated and boosted for a wealthy country like the United States that has all of the resources necessary to get everybody vaccinated and boosted up to date. We rank relatively low in the world.”

As of August 2022, 67 per cent of the American population has been fully vaccinated, according to Fauci.

He added the country is doing “very poorly” when it comes to the percentage of younger children who are vaccinated.

Only 37 per cent of American children aged 5-11 have received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The number is much lower for those ages 6 months to 4 years, at just 6 per cent.

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Fauci said a universal coronavirus vaccine – one that combats all variants – was the highest priority in the scientific community.

He also clarified details about the emergence of monkeypox, which the Biden administration declared a public health emergency this summer.

“Monkeypox is very closely related to smallpox,” explained Dr Fauci. “Decades ago when the entire world, including myself, were vaccinated against smallpox, when smallpox was a global threat, there was no monkeypox in humans.”

Fauci said monkeypox likely existed in some animal species at that time, but it was not prevalent in people.

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“Because people were protected against smallpox, because of the smallpox vaccination, that was universal. We just didn’t see human monkeypox. However, because we eradicated smallpox and the vaccinations globally stopped somewhere in the end of the ’70s, then anybody born after that time is not protected against smallpox. And, as a matter of fact, by definition, is not protected against monkeypox.”

Fauci said there is no way to predict whether pandemics caused by emerging viruses could be something we see more regularly.

“It is noteworthy that about 75 per cent of all the new emerging infections are what we call zoonotic. They emerge from an animal reservoir. Flu does that. HIV does that. Ebola does that. Covid does that. And when that happens, sometimes it’s a curiosity and it does not spread widely, but every once in a while, it’s a pandemic and that’s when you get global spread. And that’s what we’re seeing now with Covid.”