Booster doses may become the standard for a ‘full’ vaccination, he said.
U.S. infectious disease official Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday that the CCP virus can become endemic—having a constant, manageable presence in a certain region or population—if more people take booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy,” Fauci said in an interview at the Reuters Total Health conference, which runs virtually Nov. 15–18. “People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don’t think about it all the time and it doesn’t influence what we do.”
Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said making booster doses of the COVID-19 vaccine available to everyone is vital for the nation to reach endemic levels of COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, reported Reuters.
“Look what other countries are doing now about adopting a booster campaign virtually for everybody,” he added. “I think if we do that, and we do it in earnest, I think by the spring [of 2022] we can have pretty good control of this.”
He acknowledged that there are different views on what is considered as having the CCP virus under control, commenting: “You could control it at 50,000 cases a day. To me, that’s not good control, and that’s not endemicity that I would accept. … I don’t want to sit back when we have 70,000 to 85,000 new infections a day and say: ‘Oh, well, we can’t do any better than that. Let’s live with that.’ Sorry, that’s not where we want to be.”
The average national daily reported number of new cases is over 83,000 as of Nov. 15, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“For me, endemicity means a lot more people get vaccinated, a lot more people get boosted, and although you don’t eliminate or eradicate it, that infection is not dominating your life,” Fauci said.
He said booster shots can potentially increase antibodies to a protective level, although he pointed out that the CCP virus is “brand new,” and therefore, “we can’t predict.”
