With vaccine acceptance rebounding among Americans, Fauci’s goal does not appear so unrealistic.
As the Covid-19 vaccination campaign gets underway, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease scientist, told Vox’s Sean Rameswaram on Tuesday that he is hoping to get as much as 85 percent of Americans vaccinated against the virus. “If you really want true herd immunity, where you get a blanket of protection over the country… you want about 75 to 85 percent of the country to get vaccinated,” Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a live-recorded interview with Rameswaram, the host of Today, Explained. “I would say even closer to 85 percent.” How many people need to get vaccinated to end the pandemic that has already killed more than 300,000 Americans and disrupted every facet of daily life has been the subject of some debate for months, as Vox’s Umair Irfan has covered. The conventional wisdom has been that, at minimum,60 percent of people would need to be vaccinated in order to start bringing case numbers down to a manageable level. Fauci is aiming even higher. “We’ve got to get as many people as we possibly can,” he said in the Vox interview. Earlier this year, such a high threshold would have seemed outlandish. In September, the Pew Research Center found that barely half of Americans (51 percent) said they would definitely or probably get the Covid-19 vaccine.
