WASHINGTON (AP) – US health officials believe the coronavirus mutation that is sounding alarms in parts of Britain is no more likely to cause serious illness or be resistant to vaccines than the strain that affects people in the United States, but it still needs to be “very serious,” said the government’s top infectious disease expert on Sunday.
Dr. Anthony Fauci endorsed US officials’ decision to require negative COVID-19 testing before people from Britain enter the US. He refused to consider whether that step should have been taken sooner. He said the variety of the strain is something that you “have to follow very carefully” and “we’re looking at it very closely now.”
He said, “Does it make anybody sicker? Is it a more serious virus in the sense of virulence? And the answer is, it doesn’t seem to be. British officials tell their US colleagues that it looks like the vaccines being rolled out will be strong enough to handle the new variant, but, Fauci said, “we’re going to do the studies ourselves.”
Fauci said the US is in a critical phase of the pandemic, with the worst probably still ahead. He predicted that the general population would be immunized on a large scale in late March or early April – outside of frontline workers, the elderly, and certain other sections of the public who will get priority for the vaccines.
Fauci spoke about CNN’s “State of the Union”.