Fauci breaks with Trump on COVID-19 herd immunity: ‘That’s certainly not my approach’
Dr. Anthony Fauci said the U.S. shouldn’t pursue herd immunity to handle the COVID-19 pandemic, breaking with President Donald Trump, who invoked the strategy earlier this week.
Herd immunity occurs when enough of a population becomes immune to a disease through vaccine or already getting sick to make the spread unlikely between people in the community, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Herd immunity also protects newborns and people who can’t be vaccinated because it helps decrease person-to-person spread, the CDC said.
“We’re not there yet. That’s not a fundamental strategy that we’re using,” Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told MSNBC on Wednesday.
“We certainly are not wanting to wait back and just let people get infected so that you can develop herd immunity,” Fauci said. “That’s certainly not my approach.”
Trump disagreed with Fauci’s position during an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday.
“Once you get to a certain number, you know — we use the word herd, right?” Trump said. “Once you get to a certain number, it’s going to go away.”
Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist who joined the White House in August as a pandemic adviser, has encouraged White House officials to move towards herd immunity as a strategy and adopt Sweden’s response to the virus, The Washington Post reported. Sweden recommended masks and social distancing — but didn’t implement lockdowns.
Why do experts say herd immunity won’t work with COVID-19?
Health experts don’t recommend herd immunity as a strategy against the coronavirus pandemic because there’s no certainty that people become immune after getting sick, there isn’t a treatment for COVID-19 and there won’t be a way to control the virus until there’s a vaccine, The Hill reported.
Herd immunity is also most effective when it happens before a ”major outbreak” occurs — and Fauci said if social distancing and lockdown measures were lifted, a huge death toll would result, according to The Hill.
World Health Organization officials said last week that pursuing herd immunity is “very dangerous.”
“If we think about herd immunity in a natural sense of just letting a virus run, it’s very dangerous,” Maria Van Kerkhove, who helps lead the WHO’s pandemic response, said during a news briefing. “A lot of people would die.”
Dr. Leana Wen told CNN on Monday that there are “huge concerns” with trying to achieve herd immunity.
“If we’re waiting until 60% to 80% of people have it, we’re talking about 200 million-plus Americans getting this — and at a fatality rate of 1%, let’s say, that’s 2 million Americans who will die in this effort to try to get herd immunity,” Wen said. “Those are preventable deaths of our loved ones that we can just not let happen under our watch.”
