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Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, sits before a hearing by the Senate Health Education Work and Pension Committee in Washington, DC, USA, on Wednesday, September 23, 2020.
Graeme Jennings | Bloomberg | fake images
Letting the coronavirus rampage through the American population to infect as many people as possible to achieve so-called “herd immunity” would cause many unnecessary deaths and the idea is “absurd” and “dangerous,” said the leading infectious disease expert. from the country. he said Thursday.
“I’ll tell you exactly how I feel about it,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when asked if herd immunity is a viable strategy to adopt in the United States. “If you let the infections rip apart, so to speak, and you say, ‘Let everyone get infected, they can get infected and then we’ll have herd immunity.’ Frankly, that is nonsense, and anyone who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that it is nonsense and very dangerous, “Fauci told Yahoo! News.
Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient portion of the population is immune to a disease, making it unlikely to spread and protect the rest of the community, says the Mayo Clinic. It can be achieved through natural infection, when enough people are exposed to the disease and develop antibodies against it, and through vaccines.
Most scientists think that 60% to 80% of the population needs to be vaccinated or have natural antibodies to achieve herd immunity, say world health experts. Yet the nation’s leading health experts have said that most Americans remain susceptible to a coronavirus infection.
Despite those concerns, a senior White House official who briefed reporters in a call Monday mentioned an online move called the “Greater Barrington Declaration,” which favors herd immunity, NBC News reported. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, has previously said that herd immunity “is not the strategy of the United States government with respect to the coronavirus.”
The Barrington Declaration, however, assumes that people who are vulnerable to serious illness live in facilities such as nursing homes where they can be protected, but “that doesn’t work,” Fauci said.
That’s because in the population, about a third of people are prone to developing serious side effects from Covid-19, including older, obese people, who have underlying health conditions like heart disease, etc., he said.
“By the time you get herd immunity, you will have killed a lot of people that would have been avoidable,” he said.
Fauci said she has made her position on herd immunity known at the White House, adding that Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, and Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for US Disease Control and Prevention agrees.
“The three of us are very clearly against that,” he said.
