Fauci: Up to 90% vaccination required for herd immunity
Herd immunity to the novel coronavirus could require vaccination rates as high as 90%, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most prominent US infectious disease expert, in an interview published on Thursday.
More than 1 million Americans have received a first dose of a vaccine since Dec. 14, according to the CDC, that’s only about 0.3% of the population. Fauci, who advises both President Donald Trump and President-elect Joe Biden on the pandemic, admitted that he had gradually raised his estimates from the beginning of the year when he said only 60 to 70% would need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity. “We need a certain humility here” Fauci told the New York Times. “We really don’t know what the real number is. I think the real range is somewhere between 70 and 90 percent. But I’m not going to say 90 percent.”
Fauci and other experts say social distancing will be required well into 2021 as vaccines slowly roll out. The number of travelers decreased compared to 2019, when 1,937,235 flew on December 23rd. Traffic on Wednesday surpassed the previous pandemic-era peak on November 29, the Sunday after the Thanksgiving holiday, when 1,176,091 people passed TSA checkpoints, preceding a new surge in coronavirus cases in many states.
“When polls said only about half of Americans would take a vaccine, I said herd immunity would be 70 to 75 percent,” Fauci, who turned 80 Thursday, told the Times. “Then when recent polls said 60 percent or more could take it, I thought, ‘I can push this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”
