Fauci says Covid will never be eradicated

“What we can do is reach a level of ‘control’ that we can live with”, he said

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

The chief 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. While both measles and polio have been significantly reduced through worldwide efforts.

“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 months or a years time.

Asked whether or not testing would be needed in the future, in addition to a number of 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 61 per cent of the population immunised.

That compares to roughly 80 per cent of the population in the United Kingdom, and many other European nations. While many African nations have fewer than 10 per cent of their populations vaccinated, according to New York Times figures.

It comes as president Biden on Tuesday night addressed the nation with a call for millions of Americans to get vaccinated or boosted against Covid after 800,000 deaths in the US alone. 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 from the disease.