Dr. Anthony Fauci said he will take the coronavirus vaccine once it’s approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force and a national expert on infectious diseases, said he trusts Pfizer, which announced Monday that its experimental vaccine is showing to be 90% effective in trials. The doctor encouraged the government to approve the vaccine once it’s closely looked at to be secure.
“I trust Pfizer. I trust the FDA. These are colleagues of mine for decades, the career scientists,” Fauci told MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell on Tuesday. “If they look at this data and they say this data is solid, let’s go ahead and approve it … I will take the vaccine, and I will recommend that my family take the vaccine.”
The United States has recorded more than 10 million cases of the coronavirus, and has had more than 237,000 deaths. With the holiday season approaching, medical experts, including Fauci, have encouraged people to consider the risk of gathering in large groups, especially if there are people there considered to be vulnerable to the virus.
In their Monday announcement, Pfizer and BioNTech said they will seek an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration after they report additional safety data from the second dose of the vaccination. They expect to have that data by the third week of November.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said on Tuesday that he expects the vaccine to become widely available to the general public by spring. Fauci encouraged everyone to take the vaccine once it is available.
“Hopefully, since this is such an effective vaccine, or efficacious at least in the trial, that after a reasonable period of time we will get vaccine to everyone who wants and needs it, and hopefully that will be the overwhelming majority of the country,” Azar said. “Because, with a vaccine that has this potential, this, together with the continuation of the public health measures, really should get us out of this very difficult situation we’re in to. So the vaccine is a very, very important tool in ending this pandemic, both domestically and internationally.”
