If vaccination rates increase in the U.S. this fall and winter, the U.S. could regain control of the pandemic and see some normalcy return by next spring, President Joe Biden's top pandemic medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, MD, said during an Aug. 23 interview on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees.
The U.S. still needs to vaccinate some 90 million people to establish "a degree of overall blanket protection" as the nation heads into winter, when flu and respiratory syncytial virus infections may also be circulating at high rates, Dr. Fauci said. He added that it's still unclear what percentage of people need to be vaccinated to reach herd immunity.
"If we can get through this winter ... I hope we can start to get some good control in the spring of 2022," the director of the National Institutes for Allergy and Infectious Diseases said. "We could start getting back to a degree of normality, namely [resuming] the things that we were hoping we could do — restaurants, theaters, that kind of thing."
Dr. Fauci said there is a big caveat to this timeline: It's hard to predict what the virus is going to do. He called the delta variant "a sucker punch" that disrupted the sense of normalcy that was expected this summer.
"There's no guarantee, because it's up to us," he said of the spring timeline. "If we keep lingering without getting those people vaccinated that should be vaccinated, this thing could linger on, leading to the development of another variant, which could complicate things."
To view the full interview transcript, click here.