Only vaccinations can stop spread of COVID variants
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s point man on infectious diseases, spoke with the USA TODAY Editorial Board on Friday about the latest coronavirus developments. Fauci, 80, has been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 19
Q. When you were with us last time you expressed frustration with people who were COVID deniers. How are you feeling about this hardcore recalcitrant group? Are you surprised at how big it is?
A. I’m fundamentally a very tolerant person and I accept and deal with people who are seemingly doing things that are really quite unreasonable. I don’t have negative feelings toward them. I feel badly for them that they are being misled. I don’t want to get into the politics, but sometimes you almost have to. It’s all part of this propagation of almost an alternative reality. It went back to the days when I was on the task force in the Trump administration, “This is going to go away. It doesn’t really exist; don’t worry about it.” It’s the same mentality, and I don’t want to kick the cages, but a night doesn’t go by when Fox News doesn’t say a lie about me. A day doesn’t go by that some congressman, some senator propagates something that is completely misleading and completely untrue. This is a dystopian world we’re living in. I worry more about our country than I do about people lying about me. So a little bit of a long-winded answer to how I feel, but I’d like to rescue those people from getting sick. I don’t want to get into their head and change their mind. I’m a physician. I’m a scientist. I’m not a politician. I don’t want sick, and to change anything them; that I I can just do don’t to prevent want them them to from get getting sick, I’ll do.
Q. How do we keep our children who are unvaccinated safe, particularly as they are heading back to schools?
A. There are two ways to do that. One is to surround the children with people who are vaccinated. Get as many teachers as possible vaccinated; get anybody who is anywhere near a child, in what should be the protected environment of a school, vaccinated. Since you will not get 100% of those people vaccinated, that’s when you get into the CDC guidelines that whether you’re vaccinated or not, the most important thing is to get the children back to school. We have 18 months of experience, not only in the United States but in other countries, that the detrimental effect on mental health, physical and social development of children is really devastating. Getting the people around the kids vaccinated isn’t all that difficult to me. It’s common sense, but getting everybody to wear a mask, you’re going to get pushback from that. My feeling is that I would rather have a child be a little bit uncomfortable with a mask on and be healthy, than a comfortable child without a mask in an (ICU). Q. You brought up getting everybody in schools vaccinated to keep children safe. Some teachers’ unions, including the American Federation of Teachers, have come out against mandates for teachers to be vaccinated. Should there be a mandate that teachers and school staff must be vaccinated? A. If you are in a position of being responsible for another person, be that the development of a child in a school or in my position as a physician who still sees patients, I have an obligation to do everything I can to keep the people for whom I am responsible safe and healthy. Therefore, when people are in those positions, if they don’t want to get vaccinated, I would mandate that they get vaccinated. Q. If we remain in this limbo of a partially vaccinated population, if things don’t improve, what happens? A. Great question. When you get the overwhelming majority of the population vaccinated – and we don’t know what that threshold is – the virus will disappear, and then we won’t need to worry about it, at least in this country. If you don’t do that, you will get a smoldering level of infection that will just go right into the fall, get confused with influenza in the winter, and then come back again in the spring. Now for the unvaccinated who say I don’t really care, I’m young and healthy, if I get infected, it is true that, statistically, it is unlikely that you will have a serious outcome. If you were living in a vacuum, that would be fine, but you’re not living in a vacuum. And if you become the vehicle for the virus to go from you to someone else, you are helping to propagate the virus. There’s a very firm tenet that a virus cannot mutate, unless it is replicating. Now many mutations have no relevance functionally, but every once in a while you get a mutation like delta, where the mutations cause a variant. And the variant has a real functional consequence. With delta, we have a virus that spreads much more rapidly than the original alpha variant. What happens if over months and months you allow the virus to replicate, it is conceivable, that we could get a variant that eludes the protection of the vaccine.