Experts detail vaccine unknowns, need to continue masking, distancing
BY Alvin Powell Harvard Staff Writer – from the Harvard Gazette
The nation’s top infectious disease doctor offered a timeline for ending the COVID-19 pandemic this week, saying that if the coming vaccination campaign goes well, we could approach herd immunity by summer’s end and “normality that is close to where we were before” by the end of 2021.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Wednesday that that estimate is dependent on significant numbers of Americans being willing to be inoculated with one of several vaccines in various stages of development. If 75 percent to 80 percent of Americans are vaccinated in broad-based campaigns likely to start in the second quarter of next year, then the U.S. should reach the herd immunity threshold months later. If vaccination levels are significantly lower, 40 percent to 50 percent, Fauci said, it could take a very long time to reach that level of protection.
“Let’s say we get 75 percent, 80 percent of the population vaccinated,” Fauci said. “If we do that, if we do it efficiently enough over the second quarter of 2021, by the time we get to the end of the summer, i.e., the third quarter, we may actually have enough herd immunity protecting our society that as we get to the end of 2021, we can approach very much some degree of normality that is close to where we were before.”
Fauci spoke at an online “When Public Health Means Business” event sponsored by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine. He addressed an array of topics from how he handles frustration over people who refuse basic, life-saving, public health measures, to why masks will continue to be needed even after vaccination starts (the vaccines haven’t yet been shown to stop transmission).