Anthony Fauci, MD, chief medical advisor to President Biden, said he anticipates a “turnaround” in the pandemic and a trajectory that mirrors the experience of the U.K., but warned that cases here haven’t peaked yet.
During an interview hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Tuesday, the NIAID director also plugged the launch of the NIH’s Antiviral Program for Pandemics, and described his vision of an antiviral that would fight COVID-19.
New Antiviral Program
“I want a pill that blocks a specific viral function,” Fauci said. “I want to give it once a day, if possible, I want it to be low in toxicity, and I want it to have very minimal drug-drug interactions.”
“Give me that, and I’ll be really happy,” Fauci told webinar host and interviewer J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at CSIS and director of its Global Health Policy Center.
Manufacturing would need to be “scaleable,” Fauci stressed, to ensure that low- and middle-income countries would have access to any new therapy, and he underscored the need to factor in variants.
“When you have variants, you’ve got to be ready,” he said, noting that it’s unlikely it will be as simple as “one pathogen and one drug that’s the knock-out home-run drug. You always have to be ready to continue to develop alternatives that could keep up with the variants.”
Asked whether a $3.2 billion program will be enough to incentivize drugmakers, Fauci hinted that he anticipates more funding down the line.
“Nothing convinces the source of resources to give more resources than success,” he said. “If we come up with success, I think we’ll get more.”
Pandemic 2.0
Switching gears, Morrison noted that the current phase of the pandemic has stirred up anxieties once more, but also increased the pressure on Americans to get vaccinated against COVID-19 and to begin wearing masks again.
Asked whether he was hopeful that the U.S. could narrow the gap on vaccination and begin to curb the pandemic’s spread, Fauci shared his predictions, with the caveat that he can’t guarantee they will be right: “Since an acceleration of vaccines doesn’t give a result until several weeks after, we are already on a trajectory that looks strikingly similar to the sharp incline that the U.K. saw,” he said.
Average daily cases of COVID-19 ranged from 12,000 to 15,000 in the U.S. a little over a month ago, but now surpass 70,000, he noted. “We are going to be between 100,000 and 200,000 cases before this thing starts to turn around.”
A lot depends on people’s willingness to act quickly and get their shot, Fauci said, noting that 93 million eligible people remain unvaccinated.
Three states account for roughly 40% of the infections in the country, with Florida alone seeing 20% of new COVID cases nationwide, but Fauci said he’s hopeful that even in those hotspots, things are changing.
“Where you’re seeing a lot of infection, the rate of vaccination as an average is better than the rest of the country,” he said. “That’s telling us that the states that are suffering most from the increase are starting to realize that you’ve got to get vaccinated if you want to get out of this.”
Fauci praised Republican governors and a member of Congress for their work in promoting vaccination. Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) is “out beating the bushes, asking people to get vaccinated,” he said. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) is telling people, “‘Go out and get vaccinated,'” added Fauci, and we even have Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), “who doesn’t want to have mask mandates, going out, saying people should wind up getting vaccinated.”
“I think we’re going to see a turnaround,” Fauci said.
Another “game changer,” he said, would be when the COVID-19 vaccines switch from emergency use authorization to a standard approval.
Fauci said he believes that as soon as FDA grants full approval, “those people who are hesitant to get vaccinated because they perceive the emergency use authorization as not being proof enough that it’s safe and effective — even though we have ample, ample evidence that it’s highly effective and highly safe — I think you’re going to see more people get vaccinated.”
Standard approval would likely lead to the implementation of more local vaccination mandates as well, he said.
“You’re not going to see a central mandate coming from the federal government, but you’re going to see more universities, colleges, places of business — once they get the cover of an officially approved vaccine — they’re going to start mandating vaccines. So, we’re going to see an increase in vaccines, and that’s going to be the solution to the problem.”
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
