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Dr Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser on Covid-19, said on Sunday that Americans may still be wearing masks outside their homes in a year, even as he expects the country to return to “ a significant degree of normality. “In autumn.
“I want this to continue to drop to a baseline so low that there is virtually no threat,” Dr Fauci said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program, referring to the number of cases nationwide that would make him comfortable enough to stop recommending universal masking. “If you combine having most of the locals vaccinated with a very, very low level of the virus in the community, then I think you’re going to be able to say, for the most part, that we don’t have to wear masks.
Dr Fauci appeared on a series of television news broadcasts on Sunday morning, where he was asked about the dangers of the coronavirus variants, the timing of the vaccine’s rollout in the country, and when the vaccination would allow more students to go back to school.
On the latter question, Dr Fauci told “Fox News Sunday” that he hopes high school students, many of whom have returned to class compared to younger children, would be eligible for immunizations in the fall.
“That’s why we’re pushing on these studies, to get them vaccinated,” he said of the adolescents, who are currently in clinical trials by Pfizer and Moderna. “It will probably happen in the fall; I can’t say that it will be the first day of the school year in the fall.
Vaccinations for young children, however, “are unlikely to be until the start of the first trimester of 2022,” Dr Fauci said.
On the hotly debated question of whether people should wait longer than the recommended three or four weeks for a booster shot, or even skip the second dose, Dr Fauci told NBC News’ Meet the Press that ‘it was prudent for people to stick to the prescribed schedule.
“There are enough unknowns to that, especially the durability of the protection,” he said.
He added that while the new data suggesting that people who have had Covid could get sufficient protection against a dose were “really quite impressive”, it could be complicated to document who had the virus.
He also touched on the subject of the mutated variant of the coronavirus identified in South Africa. In clinical trials involving the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine in this country, patients who were inoculated were not protected from mild or moderate disease caused by the variant, known as B. 1.351. Dr Fauci said in “Fox News Sunday” that while it is still rare in the United States, “if it becomes more dominant, we may need a version of the vaccine that is effective specifically against” this.
While the United States is expected to surpass 500,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the coming days, Dr Fauci told Chuck Todd on ‘Meet the Press’ that’ we haven’t seen anything like it in over 100 years, ”since the 1918 influenza pandemic, adding,“ People will be talking about it decades, decades and decades from now. ”
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