Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House medical adviser on the coronavirus, has once again expressed concern that a dangerous COVID-19 variant could be lingering — and it could start spreading if we don’t see high vaccination rates.
Will there be more COVID variants?
Fauci told “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos on Thursday that more variants will come if people don’t get vaccinated and if COVID-19 isn’t kept under control.
- “People who say, ‘I don’t want to get vaccinated because it’s me and I’ll worry about me, I’m not having any impact on anybody else,’ that’s just not the case,” Fauci said, per ABC News.
He said the virus can mutate as it moves through an unvaccinated population, which puts everyone at risk.
- “And when you give it ample opportunity to mutate, you may sooner or later get another variant, and it is possible that that variant might be in some respects worse than the already very difficult variant we’re dealing with now, which is a major reason why you want to completely suppress the circulation of the virus in the community,” Fauci said, according to ABC News.
Fauci spoke about this same topic on Wednesday. He said the world is lucky to have a vaccine that can stop the delta variant and that the delta variant doesn’t evade vaccines so far, as I wrote for the Deseret News.
- “Quite frankly, we’re very lucky that the vaccines that we have now do very well against the variants — particularly against severe illness,” Fauci said, according to news site McClatchy. “We’re very fortunate that that’s the case. There could be a variant that’s lingering out there that can push aside delta.”
Fauci said the world could be in trouble if a more transmissible variant emerges — one that evades the vaccines, per The Sacramento Bee.
- “If another one comes along that has an equally high capability of transmitting but also is much more severe, then we could really be in trouble,” he said, according to The Sacramento Bee. “People who are not getting vaccinated mistakenly think it’s only about them. But it isn’t. It’s about everybody else, also.”
Experts recently told Newsweek that other coronavirus variants could emerge in the near future — ones that are worse than delta. In fact, there’s a chance of a “doomsday” variant as well, which could evade vaccines, according to Newsweek.