Everyone who is interested in not dropping dead should read this.

The Wall Street Journal

BUSINESS

JOURNAL REPORTS: LEADERSHIP

Anthony Fauci on the Vaccination Timetable, and the Hurdles to Meet It

One big problem, he says: Too many people still don’t believe the virus is real.

Anthony Fauci says we ‘need to have a uniform message that comes from the top right down to each and every person involved.’

December 13, 2020

Anthony Fauci says he thinks everyone in the U.S. who is willing to be vaccinated could be by early summer. There are, of course, hurdles, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease expert told Wall Street Journal reporter Jonathan D. Rockoff at the CEO Council summit. Edited excerpts follow.

WSJ: As we wait for vaccinations to begin, what do we need more of, or what should we do differently, to protect against Covid-19?

DR. FAUCI: We have to have a uniformity of purpose. We know clearly that uniform wearing of masks, physical distancing, avoiding of crowds—particularly indoors—washing hands frequently, all seem simple in the backdrop of the enormity of the problem we’re facing.

But when you compare comparable situations in which one state, city, town, or even country implemented these measures, they were able to either prevent surges or turn around the dynamics.

And yet, we don’t do that uniformly. It’s extraordinarily frustrating.We have not yet seen the full effect of the [Thanksgiving] traveling and congregating. That should be probably in the next week and a half or so [roughly, Dec. 9-19]. And then we’re going to enter the Christmas season with more traveling and congregating at family and social gatherings.

So we’re in for a very challenging period.

And the only way we’re going to counter that is by a consistent, uniform implementation and an adherence to public-health measures.

Trouble is, you go to different parts of the country and even when the outbreak is clear and hospitals are on the verge of being overrun, there are a substantial proportion of the people who still think that this is not real, that it’s fake news or that it’s a hoax. It’s extraordinary. I’ve never really seen anything like this. We’ve got to overcome that and pull together as a nation uniformly with adhering to these public-health measures.

WSJ: Part of the problem is the mixed messages from the Trump administration. Also, the administration has left a lot of the decision-making to individual states, so we’ve seen a lot of variation across the states. What are you telling President-elect Biden and his transition team?

DR. FAUCI: I haven’t had the opportunity in great detail. But I will be telling them exactly what I just told you right now. And you make a very good point about the disparity among the different states. We need to have a uniform message that comes from the top right down to each and every person involved. The health officials, physicians, scientists, public-health officials.

We’ve all got to be on the same page telling the American public that we’ve got to pull together.

That, to me, is the most important thing. A uniformity of approach and not disparate where some groups do one thing and other groups do another. That’s my main message.

WSJ: Does Washington need to insist on masking, distancing and testing, and provide more resources for all of that?

DR. FAUCI: We definitely need to provide resources. We know now that in schools, the rate of infection is less than what we would have predicted. And the children seem to be doing well. But we’ve got to provide the resources to teachers and local communities to be able to address contingencies with regard to protecting the health and welfare of the children and teachers.

You have probably often heard me say close the bars and keep the schools open. I didn’t mean that to be a facetious sound bite. I meant that it’s important to do that. But if you were going to close the bars and limit capacity of indoor dining in restaurants, we’ve got to get some relief to the bar and tavern owners, to the restaurant owners. There has to be resources to help enterprises like restaurants and bars to participate in the public-health endeavor. We seem to sometimes forget that. We ask people to do things that is very deleterious to their welfare, namely closing up or not allowing full capacity indoors in a restaurant.

WSJ: President-elect Biden said that he wants you to be his chief medical adviser. Are you going to do it?

DR. FAUCI: Oh, yes. I’ve already told the president-elect that I would gladly accept. It is very similar to what I’m doing now. I spend the overwhelming amount of my time on Covid-19, both the science of it and the development of vaccines and therapeutics, the public-health component as well as the communication. Communication is a very important part of all of this.

WSJ:When can CEOs expect their employees to have been vaccinated?

DR. FAUCI: The only prioritization established and officially made public is priority 1A: health-care providers and those in nursing homes and extended-care facilities. After that, you will likely see people with critical jobs in society, teachers, elderly, people with underlying conditions. You get to the general population, people who are young, relatively young, healthy and have no underlying conditions, likely by the end of March, beginning of April.

If we’re efficient in that and, this is the critical issue, if we can convince the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population to take the vaccine, when we get through April, May, and June, we could likely get most everybody and anybody who can get vaccinated to be vaccinated.

Appeared in the December 14, 2020, print edition as 'Fauci on Vaccination Timing.'