View Comments
Dr. Anthony Fauci said a COVID-19 vaccine — something the entire world is hoping will put an end to the pandemic — might not last forever and its impact will be finite.
What’s going on?
- Fauci appeared a livestream with Dr. Francis Collins, director of National Institutes of Health, where he talked about the COVID-19 vaccine, according to MarketWatch.
- He said “we do not know the answer” to how long the vaccine will shield someone from the virus.
- Fauci said: “You can assume, that you’re going to get protection at least to take us at least through this cycle.”
- “When you look at natural infection it’s anywhere from six months to a year. However, with this spike protein that’s being presented in the way that we do it, with primes and in some cases boosts, we’re going to assume that there’s a degree of protection, but we have to assume that it’s going to be finite.”
- “It’s not going to be like a measles vaccine. So there’s going to be follow-up in those cases to see if we might need a boost. We might need a boost to continue the protection, but right now we do not know how long it lasts.”
What about reinfection?
- Fauci said cases of recovered COVID-19 patients being reinfected are probably wrong. He said it’s more likely that COVID-19 tests picked up parts of the virus within the patients body, CNBC reports.
- “There are no documented cases where people got better and actually got sick again in the sense of virus replicating. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rare case of an individual who went into remission and relapsed.”
Fauci previously said vaccine may not help long term
- Fauci said: “When you look at the history of coronaviruses, the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that’s protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year. That’s not a lot of durability and protection.”