Fauci is back, America gets a Covid-19 reality check

By Nikhila Natarajan New York, Jan 22 : Dr. Anthony Fauci is back. After months of being sidelined and attacked by Donald Trump, America’s top infectious diseases expert returned to the White House briefing room and declared that the US could return to “a degree of normality” by the Fall if the Covid-19 vaccination campaign goes well this summer.
The ambitious project is the Joe Biden administration’s biggest challenge and remains a big ‘if’ because of “vaccine hesitancy”, as Fauci put it. Achieving widespread or “herd” immunity would require vaccinating as many as 280 million people.
Vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are currently in the mix, Johnson and Johnson now has sufficient data from its late-stage vaccine trial to crunch the data soon.
“If we can get 70 to 85 per cent of the country vaccinated by the end of… middle of the summer months, we could approach a degree of normality by Fall,” was Fauci’s assessment of a best case scenario for the US as things stand right now.
A little more than 17 million doses have been administered as on January 21. The Trump administration had talked up a goal of vaccinating 20 million before the end of December 2020.
Fauci’s remarks come on a day when US President Joe Biden announced his goal of vaccinating 100 million people in 100 days and signed off on 10 executive orders all aimed at jumpstarting his national Covid-19 strategy. Biden also released a 198 page document on how his administration plans to get a handle on the pandemic’s deadly surge.