WASHINGTON — Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, said Monday that the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is a “mixed bag” entering the holiday season and that Americans should get their vaccine booster shots as soon as they are eligible.
More than 64 million U.S. adults are not vaccinated, and the Biden administration is preparing for significant resistance from parents as vaccines become available to children ages 5 to 11 this week.
“It’s a mixed bag,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told McClatchy in an interview. “I feel good that the cases, the hospitalizations and the deaths are coming down. I’m still concerned that we have 64 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated who have not been vaccinated.
“So it’s a mixed feeling in reaction to where things are,” he added. “It’s good news that we’re continuing to come down. It’s a bit frustrating when we have so many people who are eligible to be vaccinated who are not.”
Those who are vaccinated can plan to celebrate the holidays with a greater sense of normalcy, he said.
“Vaccinated people should look forward to spending holidays with the family and close friends,” Fauci said. “You’d like to know the status of the people if you’re going to have indoor gatherings with them, but if you’re vaccinated, you should look forward to spending your typical holiday time with family and with close friends.”
Although he plans to stay in Washington and have family visit, Fauci said he would have “no problem” getting on an airplane to travel.
New data on vaccine boosters out of Israel provide a strong case for people to get the additional shots as soon as they are eligible, Fauci said.
“The data are really quite striking, of the difference and the protection that you get among individuals who have been boosted versus just vaccinated,” Fauci said. “People will make their individual choice, but I think if you look at the data, it would be suggested that when you are eligible, that you should get vaccinated with your boost.”
There is not enough U.S. data to determine whether booster shots are contributing to a decline in COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths across the country. But it is possibly contributing to the drop based on early data coming out of Israel, which Fauci said is usually a month ahead of the United States in releasing vaccine data.
“I would expect that if we keep getting people vaccinated, more and more, the likelihood of there being a reversal of a downward trend becomes less and less,” Fauci said.
Based on the new data, members of the White House coronavirus response team are currently examining whether an individual’s third vaccine shot after two doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, or second shot after Johnson & Johnson’s single dose, should be counted as a “booster” at all — or as the completion of a new regimen.
“It is conceivable — though we don’t know that until we prove it — that that third shot of an mRNA and second shot of a J&J might give much more durable protection than what the first two shots gave, and you would not see the waning that we’ve seen just with the primary vaccination regimen,” he said. “You’re going to have to follow these people and let the data tell you what the answer is.”
While the Food and Drug Administration has given the green light to “mixing and matching” different vaccine products, Fauci still encourages people to stick with the same vaccine manufacturer for their additional dose, whenever possible.
“It’s just that if you’ve done well with one product, why not stay with the same product?” he said.
The delta variant — a highly contagious mutation that surged nationwide throughout the summer — remains the predominant strain across the United States, responsible for over 99% of cases.
Fauci said it is impossible to say whether a variant worse than delta may emerge.
“All you can do is talk about what we know,” Fauci said. “We know that if you get more and more people vaccinated, and get the level of virus dynamics in the population as expressed by the number of cases per day — we’re at around 70,000 or so per day — the lower you get that number, the less likely you are to get mutations that could lead to a different variant.
“You can’t predict what new variant is going to occur,” he added, “except to say that the likelihood of there being mutations that would lead to a variant is always higher the higher level of viral dynamics there is in society.”
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