In a Newsweek interview, Fauci says a presidential edict to force the FDA to approve an expedited COVID-19 vaccine before Election Day would never fly.
Dr. Anthony Fauci may be the only immunologist in the world who needs no introduction. He's dealt with numerous infectious disease outbreaks—and the political turmoil that often surrounds them. As a member of the Coronavirus Task Force, he's taken heat from White House aides and others who chafe at his frank opinions about the pandemic response.
There are a number of checkpoints in that process that would make it very difficult for politics to have an influence on whether a vaccine is approved for use before it was shown truly to be safe and effective. The accumulation of data and the analysis of data is unbiased. An independent group called a Data and Safety Monitoring Board is associated with every clinical trial that has NIH [National Institutes of Health] fingerprints on it.
Any degree of protection is better than no degree of protection. You need to make sure that people understand that you will not 100 percent protected. Therefore, you need to continue to wear a mask, you need to continue to be physically distant, and you need to continue to avoid crowds. Having the vaccine on board is just an extra, added level of protection.
I don't waste a lot of time trying to figure out if it's 185,000 or 191,000 [deaths]. It's almost certainly in that ballpark. And all of the other crazy theories, particularly the QAnon theory that it's only 6 percent, is total nonsense.
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