Dr. Anthony Fauci said COVID-19 could be reduced from a pandemic emergency to an endemic in 2022 if America further ramps up its vaccination rates and those who are immunized get their booster shots.
In the U.S., more than 70% of adults are fully vaccinated, and Fauci shared that if more get the shot and boosters become available to everyone, by spring of 2022 the country could get COVID-19 under control.
"To me, if you want to get to endemic, you have got to get the level of infection so low that it does not have an impact on society, on your life, on your economy," Fauci said in an interview at the Reuters Total Health conference.
However, Fauci shared that he and other health experts believe COVID-19 will never be eliminated, but instead become an endemic. The chief medical adviser to Joe Biden explained that now experts think it will always be present like the flu or chickenpox.
"People will still get infected. People might still get hospitalized, but the level would be so low that we don't think about it all the time, and it doesn't influence what we do," Fauci said.
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Fauci continued to push for vaccines, adding that booster doses are crucial to the pandemic being downgraded to an endemic. He explained what health officials believe during the Reuters Total Health conference.
Those eligible for booster shots include the immunocompromised who are six months out from being vaccinated, those 65 and older, and other people at high risk of severe disease due to their job or living situations.
Some states have gone beyond the federal recommendations for boosters, expanding the availability earlier than others.
The CDC will decide on Friday whether or not they should expand eligibility for booster shots to all adults.
"Look what other countries are doing now about adopting a booster campaign virtually for everybody. I think if we do that … by the spring, we can have pretty good control of this," Fauci said.
Fauci added that several considerations are being discussed for getting the virus under control, and he doesn't "want to sit back when we have 70,000 to 85,000 new infections a day."
"You could control it at 50,000 cases a day. To me, that's not good control, and that's not endemicity that I would accept," he said, adding it is still better than the latter.
