Anthony Fauci tells Britons ‘don’t despair, don’t give up’

US infectious diseases expert tells Britons in midst of second nationwide lockdown that new vaccines mean ‘the end is in sight’.

Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci. Picture: AFP

Anthony Fauci is confident Denmark’s new mink coronavirus variant will not have any impact on vaccines in development, predicting there will be “three or four immediate vaccines” made available soon to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dr Fauci, the director of the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Britons currently in the midst of a harsh second nationwide lockdown that “the end is in sight, don’t despair and please don’t give up”, anticipating that soon-to-be-released results from the Moderna phase three vaccine trials will be as promising as the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which showed 90 per cent efficacy.

Another vaccine, the Russian-backed Sputnik V, has shown 92 per cent efficacy. The Oxford AstraZeneca team will within weeks also report phase three results of its candidate vaccine, which will be made available to Australians.

Dr Fauci said when he was made aware of the mink mutation of COVID-19, known as Cluster-5, “you pay attention, you can’t blow it off”.

In an address to Chatham House in London, Dr Fauci said his team looked at the binding sites of the mink mutation, where the spike protein binds to the Ace 2 receptor, after Denmark researchers raised fears a week ago that it could impact on vaccine efficacy and the United Kingdom immediately banned any incoming passengers and freight from Denmark.

Such was the initial concern the Danish government passed a new law to cull all 17 million mink in Denmark and implemented a lockdown in the north of the country to stop the spread of the mink mutation.

“It doesn’t appear at this point that the mutation identified in minks is going to have an impact on vaccines and vaccine-induced response,” Dr Fauci said.

“It might impact on monoclonal antibodies against the virus, but we don’t know yet; at first cut it doesn’t look like a big problem for current vaccines to produce an immune response.”

Acknowledging Covid-fatigue, Dr Fauci said there was no appetite for lockdowns around the world, but warned with multiple vaccines on the horizon, “we have to hang on and double down on the public health measures”.

He criticised regional responses to the coronavirus, saying that what happened in one part of a country would influence what happens in other parts of the country, not just in the United States, but even when there were parts of the world acting independently.

“This is a respiratory transmittable disease, you can be damn sure (what happens in one part of the world) will happen in every other part of the world,” he said, adding that pain and suffering was common to everyone in a pandemic.

“No one country can look at the rest and say ‘I am in great shape, I am on my own and to heck with you’; we are really in this together. We can stop this by pulling together, to have solidarity.”

Dr Fauci, who turns 80 on Christmas Eve, warned that COVID-19 would not be eradicated. In his 36 years with the National Institute, he said he had been through viruses like HIV, ebola, the pandemic flu, and he was doing the same things now “to get my arms around this (COVID-19) outbreak and to put it to rest.”

“We are not eradicating it, I doubt we will eradicate it, the plan is to maintain control over it chronically, it becomes endemic, it’s not going to be a pandemic as vaccines will turn that around.”

He also believed that vaccines may only work for a year or two as the history of other coronaviruses like the common cold show infections of 15 to 30 per cent a year and that revaccination would be required “intermittently”.

“(The history of the common cold) tells us the durability of immunity is not of the scale of measles, which is lifelong — (immunity to COVID-19) is definitely finite, it will be measured in a year or two, not 30 years.”

In the meantime he said the world needed more therapies and antiviral treatments to treat the earliest symptoms of the disease and stop hospitalisations. He said therapies such as the corticosteroid dexamethasone and antiviral remdesivir have helped people late in the course of coronavirus, even when on ventilators requiring oxygen, and there were promising developments with monoclonal antibodies.

Dr Fauci, who describes himself as a “realist, but also an idealist” said his faith in the goodness of people would prevail over the “politicised division and anti-science aggression” he had faced in recent months.

While he has received death threats, Dr Fauci said “better angels will prevail, I don’t think I am naive”.