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CHICAGO: Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, said he has had no contact with President-elect Joe Biden’s COVID-19 transition team and sees no reason to resign and join that. effort when there is so much to do now to fight. the growing pandemic.
“I stay in my lane. I am not a politician. I do public health things,” he said in an interview on Thursday (November 12) ahead of the Reuters Total Health conference next week.
Since January, Fauci has served on President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force, a position that has frequently put him at odds with the president, who has tried to downplay the pandemic and focus on instead in opening the economy.
“There is absolutely no reason or any sense for you to stop doing something in the middle of a pandemic that is playing an important role in helping us get out of the pandemic,” Fauci said.
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His advice to the president-elect, he said, is “exactly the same” as the one he’s recommending now: social distancing, avoiding crowds, wearing masks, washing hands. “The principles of public health do not change from month to month or from one administration to another.”
Fauci has served in six administrations and rose to fame fighting the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan.
His “daily work” is the development of vaccines and therapeutics as director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, work that is beginning to bear fruit.
On Monday, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech announced that their experimental coronavirus vaccine was more than 90 percent effective, significantly higher than most experts had anticipated.
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Moderna, a company developing a similar vaccine with support from the White House’s Operation Warp Speed program, is expected to report the results of its late-stage vaccine trial in the next week.
Both vaccines use messenger RNA (mRNA) technology, a completely new rapid vaccine platform that uses synthetic genes to trigger an immune response. Older methods often use some form of inactivated or killed virus particles.
“It was a home run for the Pfizer product, more than 90 percent – close to 95 percent – effective. I have every reason to believe that the Moderna product will be similar,” Fauci said.
“It is a platform almost identical to the Pfizer vaccine, so I would not be surprised at all if it was very effective,” Fauci added.
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The next big question about mRNA technology is safety. Fauci took as a good sign the fact that neither the Pfizer trial, which has enrolled more than 43,000 people so far, nor the Moderna trial, which involves 30,000, had to stop to investigate safety concerns.
“That is really good news,” he said. People in both trials will be followed for two years to make sure there are no long-term side effects. Other than that, “I think the mRNA platform is here to stay,” he predicted.
Despite the high standard set by the Pfizer vaccine so far, Fauci said he believes there is still “a lot of room for multiple vaccines, although there may be a modest degree of difference in overall efficacy.”
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