Web Extra: Dr. Anthony Fauci On The 'Mystical Terminology Of Herd Immunity'
The United States is at a new inflection point in the COVID-19 pandemic. Public health experts are beginning to say that the country may not reach so-called “vaccine-mediated herd immunity.”
“I always say there’s this elusive, somewhat mystical terminology of ‘herd immunity’ and ‘herd immunity threshold,’ ” Dr. Anthony Fauci says. “You know, that is when you get such a blanketed protection over the community. And we don’t know what that number is. I mean, it’s an estimate. I have estimated for months now it’s somewhere between 70 and 85 percent.”
While Fauci says he’s always called herd immunity somewhat elusive, it’s only very recently that he, and other public health leaders, have ventured to say clearly we may never reach that threshold — no matter what it is.
And why? About a third of American adults are fully vaccinated. More than half have had at least one shot. But new daily vaccinations are dropping, and polls find that about 30 percent of the US population is still reluctant to be vaccinated.
That’s leading some public health experts, including former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, to say that they don’t expect much more than 50 percent of Americans to eventually be fully vaccinated.
In this special web exclusive, Dr. Anthony Fauci joins Meghna Chakrabarti to discuss herd immunity, potential measures to help guide public health decisions and more.
In this web exclusive … we hear from:
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (@NIAIDNews)
Full Transcript:
Anthony Fauci: Well, [the vaccination efforts] continue to do really, really very well. If you look at the fact that we now have over 200 million doses, about 220 million doses were given during the first 100 days of the Biden administration. So, things continue to look good.
