Omicron could become endemic in 2022 –Fauci

The Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States, and Chief Medical Adviser to President Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, says COVID-19 could become an endemic infection in 2022.

Fauci said COVID-19 would move from a pandemic to an endemic disease in 2022 unless certain parameters are met.

He further said there is a highly effective, safe intervention that a substantial proportion of the population has not made use of Yahoo Finance reported.

He also noted that ignoring the intervention was complicating the response to an already formidable challenge from a very evasive virus.

He stated further that he is worried about the unvaccinated individuals and how that charts the course for 2022.

If you get “a combination of enough people vaccinated and boosted together with people who are infected and recover and have a degree of immunity — hopefully they’ll wind up getting vaccinated too — and you have a virus, a variant, that has a lesser degree of pathogenicity” and it isn’t disrupting society, then and only then can it be considered endemic, Fauci told Yahoo Finance.

He said the worst-case scenario is if we get hit with another variant that actually eludes the immune protection.

“I hope that’s not the case,” Fauci said.

Adding, he said, “The thing that makes it less likely, but not impossible, is that by that time, you will have so many people vaccinated and already infected, that you might have a level of community protection that may not get you away from the next variant, but would protect you from the severity of the next variant.”

PHW