US will never completely eliminate Covid, says Dr Anthony Fauci

Gino Spoochia
December 23 2021

As Americans prepare for a second Christmas with Covid, health chief Dr Anthony Fauci has warned that the United States will never be able to completely eradicate the disease.

The top medical adviser to US President Joe Biden argued in an interview on Tuesday that without an availability of vaccines worldwide, there was no way Covid could be eradicated.

It follows only one disease, smallpox, being fully suppressed through scientific intervention, Dr Fauci told The Atlantic.

“I don’t think it’s possible that we’re going to eradicate this infection,” Dr Fauci said. “Because we’ve only eradicated one infection in human history, and that’s smallpox.”

“And I don’t think you’re going to eliminate it, because you have to have essentially a universal campaign for vaccination like we did for polio and measles,” he added.

While the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has made similar claims about Covid before, his warning on Tuesday was among the starkest yet about what life will look like in the future.

Asked whether or not testing would still be needed, in addition to public health measures, Dr Fauci said he did not know for sure, but that the current situation of “worrying” about every social interaction was not going to stay.

“What we can do is reach a level of ‘control’ that we can live with – where it doesn’t disrupt society, it doesn’t disrupt the economy, and it doesn’t have us always looking over our shoulder wondering whether we’re going to get infected,” the NIAID director said.

“I see that there will be persistence of Covid-19, or at least SARS-CoV-2, but there’s not going to be the profound impact that it’s currently having right now in our society. Whether that’s this coming spring and summer or a year from now, I don’t know. But it’s not going to stay the way it is, for sure.”

The US also has one of the lowest proportion of adults fully vaccinated against Covid among developed nations, with around 61pc of the population immunised. That compares to roughly 80pc of the population in the UK, and many other European nations.

It comes as Mr Biden addressed the nation with a call for millions of Americans to get vaccinated or boosted against Covid after 800,000 deaths in the US. He said there was a “patriotic duty” to get the shot.

He also acknowledged the Trump administration’s work on researching and funding Covid vaccines, in what was an apparent attempt at persuading vaccine-hesitant Americans on the right to protect themselves and others.

Meanwhile Fox News has defended political commentator Jesse Watters after he used the phrase “kill shot” in a speech urging young conservatives to confront Dr Fauci in public with a hostile interview. Dr Fauci, asked about it on CNN, said that Mr Watters should be fired “on the spot” but predicted he wouldn’t be held accountable for his language.

Fox said Mr Watters’ words had been “twisted completely out of context”.

Mr Watters, also a host on Fox News Channel’s panel show The Five, who made his initial mark doing aggressive interviews for Bill O’Reilly, spoke on Monday to a group of college and high school conservatives. His audience booed at the mention of Dr Fauci’s name.

Mr Watters said Dr Fauci should be confronted on the subject of whether the National Institute of Health funded research at a lab in Wuhan, China. He said an interviewer should suggest he lied about the topic – something Dr Fauci has disputed.

“Now you go in for the kill shot, the kill shot with an ambush, deadly, because he doesn’t see it coming,” Mr Watters said.

A partial clip of Mr Watters’ speech, beginning with the “kill shot” quote, spread around the internet, with some commentators suggesting that he had advocated assassinating Dr Fauci. (© Independent News Service).