Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said that the coronavirus vaccines currently in distribution across the United States will work at preventing the highly transmissible mutations out of the United Kingdom and South Africa.
“We’re paying very close attention to [the U.K. and South African variants], there are alternative plans if we ever have to modify the vaccines,” Fauci said from the White House Thursday. “Right now, from the reports we have, as of today, it appears that the vaccines will still be effective against them.”
Two separate mutations of the coronavirus were discovered in the U.K. and South Africa in 2020 and have spread quickly since then. The U.K. variant, first discovered in Kent, England, in September has led to at least 144 cases in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Infectious disease experts advising the British government believe the new variant is between 50% and 74% more contagious than other strains.
The variant from South Africa, meanwhile, was first detected in December. The network of South African scientists that discovered the mutated virus could not say definitively that the variant is more severe or contagious than others but said the mutation’s ability to attach to cells easily suggests that it “may be associated with increased transmissibility.”
“Thus far, it does not appear at all that the South African strain is in the United States,” Fauci said Thursday. “However, we must be honest and say that the level of comprehensive sequence surveillance thus far is not at the level that we would have liked, so we’re going to be looking very, very carefully for it.”
Viruses mutate all the time, and they are not always more contagious or severe than others. The higher rates of transmission, however, could further strain the U.S. healthcare system. New COVID-19 hospitalizations have remained high since late fall 2020 and remain high in the South and the West.
The best chance the U.S. has of returning to something close to pre-pandemic normal is to vaccinate 75% to 85% of the general population, Fauci said.
“The best-case scenario for me is that we’d get 85% of the people vaccinated by the end of the summer,” Fauci said. “If we do, then by the time we get to the fall, I think we can approach the degree of normality.”
President Biden has pledged to vaccinate 100 million people within his first 100 days in office.
Biden advisers told CNN on Thursday that his administration will have to begin the mass vaccination campaign “from scratch,” saying that the outgoing Trump administration left Biden with no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of. When asked about those reports, Fauci told reporters that “we certainly are not starting from scratch because there is activity going on in the distribution.”
“We’re coming in with fresh ideas but also some ideas that were not bad ideas with the previous administration. You can’t say it was absolutely not usable at all,” Fauci said.
Roughly 17.2 million people in the U.S. have been vaccinated against the coronavirus so far, and nearly 36 million doses have been distributed to states. Still, Fauci maintains that Biden’s goal for widespread immunization “is quite a reasonable goal.”
Many more millions have been infected with the coronavirus and recovered. Those people are thought to have protection against COVID-19.
