Dr. Anthony Fauci recently told The Wall Street Journal that the coronavirus vaccine won’t help reduce the spread of the novel coronavirus if not enough Americans take it.
Fauci said more than one-third of Americans would have to take the vaccine for it to prove effective.
- “It’s a combination of how effective a vaccine is and how many people use it,” Fauci said. “If you have a vaccine that is highly effective and not enough people get vaccinated, you’re not going to realize the full, important effect of having a vaccine.”
Fauci said health officials hope the vaccine creates a lower level of infection so that there will be few outbreaks of the coronavirus.
Americans are still unsure about whether or not to take the coronavirus vaccine when it becomes available. In fact, a new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found that a quarter of Utahns wouldn’t take an Federal Drug Administration-approved vaccine, and another quarter don’t know if they’d take it.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, recently told CNN that the hesitancy among Americans to get the vaccine needs to be addressed.
- “Those who are vaccine hesitant have had their hesitancy enhanced by a variety of things that are happening right now, particularly the unfortunate mix of science and politics,” Collins said, according to CNN. “I don’t want to have us, a year from now, having a conversation about how we have in our hands the solution to the worst pandemic of more than 100 years, but we haven’t been able to actually convince people to take charge of it,” Collins said.