- If enough Americans get vaccinated, Dr. Fauci believes sporting events and theaters could open by the end of summer or early fall of next year.
- An estimated 75% to 85% of Americans will need to take the coronavirus vaccine to achieve herd immunity.
- Dr. Fauci received Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine on Tuesday and said the only side effect he experienced was a sore arm.
The coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. has been raging for nearly 11 months now and, it’s fair to say, Americans are eager to get back to a normal way of life. When that may actually happen, though, is dependant on a few factors. While coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are promising, an estimated 75% to 85% of Americans will need to take it in order to decidedly stop the coronavirus in its tracks. What’s more, the amount of time needed to manufacture enough vaccine doses is another variable that will impact how soon Americans can get back to a pre-coronavirus lifestyle.
The good news is that a growing percentage of Americans have indicated a willingness to take a vaccine. Further, with Pfizer and Moderna looking to ramp up production as quickly as they can, there’s a chance that healthy Americans will be able to take a COVID-19 vaccine as early as late-March. In such a scenario, Dr. Anthony Fauci believes that sporting events and theaters could open a little bit sooner than initially anticipated.
“If we, by the time we get to April put on a very very strong vaccine administration effort and do it through April, May, June, and July,” Fauci said during an interview with The Wall Street Journal, “by the time we get to the end of the summer and into the fall, we could have enough of a—blanket or umbrella or whatever you want to call it—protection in the community that we might begin to start approaching some sort of normality.”
When asked if this normality might even encompass a World Series with crowds in the stand, Fauci said that it’s “quite possible.”
“But it is going to be up to us,” Fauci went on to say. “If we only wind up getting 50% of the people vaccinated, we’re not going to get to that point very quickly.”
Fauci also stressed that the arrival of effective vaccines shouldn’t be a reason for people to let their guard down and stop following coronavirus safety guidelines.
We can see the end in sight. Vaccines are really gonna get us out of this. But we can’t throw up our hands and say, ‘Okay, vaccines are here so we can forget about public health measures.’ It’s almost the opposite to me. That we want to double down on public health measures because as we put an end to this, we don’t want to be the last ones to get sick and die by this. It’s kind of like, the last month of a war, you don’t want to get killed in the last month of a war. You don’t want to wind up getting sick and continuing the propagation of this outbreak as we’re getting the scientific capability of essentially putting an end to it.
Fauci ended the interview on an optimistic note and guaranteed that the pandemic is going to end one day. We can only hope that by this time next year, the coronavirus pandemic will be nothing more than a memory.
