Fauci Says ‘There Will Be an End’ to Covid-19

Covid-19 can be removed as a public-health threat with good, widely administered vaccines and strong public-health measures, and a degree of normality might return by the end of 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.

“With a combination of a good vaccine together with good public health measures, we may be able to put this coronavirus outbreak behind us, the way we put the original SARS behind us,” Dr. Fauci, a leader of the U.S. government’s Covid-19 response, told The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in an interview via remote video. “There will be an end to this, and we will be able to get back to normal.”

Dr. Fauci, who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that those measures could pave the way for a return to a “reasonable form of normality” by the end of 2021.

Businesses and public health leaders are concerned about how long the new coronavirus, which has caused more than 29 million cases and 938,000 deaths, will continue to spread and whether it can be beaten back eventually as a public health threat.

A related coronavirus, which caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, hasn’t returned after infecting more than 8,000 people and killing 774 over a decade and a half ago. But SARS didn’t spread as easily from one person to another as Covid-19 does, nor did it reach across the entire globe.

Dr. Fauci said it is unlikely Covid-19 could be eradicated. But he said that it would be possible under the right conditions to remove it as a public-health threat. Whether or not that happens will depend on how effective vaccines that are currently in development or testing prove to be, how many people get them, and how well public-health measures such as isolating exposed or infected people are deployed, he said.

“If you have a vaccine that is highly effective, but very few people get vaccinated, you’re not going to realize the full important effect of having a vaccine,” he said.

“The fundamental goal is to get the level of infection in the country so low that when there are little blips of infection, you can easily control them,” he said.