Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday apologized for a prediction he had made publicly on Monday that The United States will take more than a year to control the coronavirus, that is, until the fall of 2022.
During an appearance Tuesday on CNN, Chief Medical Adviser to President Joe Biden offered an apology and said he meant that the goal of fully controlling the coronavirus pandemic may be available sooner, in the spring of 2022 instead of the fall, As I said on Monday, but only if people who refuse to vaccinate decide to get the vaccine.
“No, Anderson, I have to apologize,” Fauci told CNN presenter Anderson Cooper. “When I heard the recording, I meant spring 2022, so I spoke badly. And in the conversation with Mary Louise Kelly, she was saying, when do you think we can have some control? And I said yes we can spend this winter and get the vast majority of the 90 million people who haven’t been vaccinated to be vaccinated, I hope we can start to have good control in the spring of 2022. I wasn’t referring to the fall.I was wrong, the my mistake. “
Earlier on NPR, Fauci commented that it was possible to control the coronavirus pandemic in the United States in the fall of 2022.
In this interview, Fauci said this result depended on widespread vaccination, a controversial issue that persists for more than eight months after Covid-19 vaccines became available to the public, as the more contagious delta variant causes a further increase in cases and health officials are pushing for a third dose of vaccines Covid-19 reinforcement.
“If everything goes the way we want,” Fauci had said Monday in an interview with CNN, “and we really got the overwhelming majority of people vaccinated. I think as we get into the fall and the winter, we could start to have good control over this in the fall of 2022 ”.
In answering Cooper’s follow-up question about what he meant by getting “control” of the coronavirus, Fauci said it translated into a “general degree of general community protection” that could see a return to “a degree of normalcy.”
But Fauci did not define what percentage of the population should be vaccinated to control the pandemic.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted full approval to the two-dose COVID-19 vaccine of Pfizer-BioNTech on Monday, a move the Biden administration hopes will convince those who resist receiving it. vaccines.
Pfizer and Moderna are also testing vaccines in young children, and data from clinical trials are expected to be presented to the FDA in the fall. At this time, no COVID-19 vaccine is available for children under 12 years of age.
More than 171 million people have been completely vaccinated in the U.S., representing 51.6% of the population, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). More than 202 million, or about 60.9% of the population, have received at least one dose.