Dr. Fauci says coronavirus vaccine trials could be successful by ‘late fall’

Dr. Anthony Fauci warned Tuesday that reopening cities and states too quickly could trigger an outbreak that would get out of control and turn the clock back on efforts to fight the coronavirus.  

‘You will trigger an outbreak as you may not be able to control,’ he warned in his testimony before the Senate, adding ‘which in fact will set you back, not only leading to some suffering and death that could be avoided but could even set you back and almost turned the clock back rather than going forward. That is my major concern.’ 

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, also conceded the death rate is likely higher than the 80,000 reported. 

But with his warning came words of hope as he said scientists aim to know if a successful coronavirus vaccine has been found by ‘late fall and early winter.  

In his testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, Fauci said scientists are already testing possible vaccines in a phase one clinical trial with an eye of going to phase two this summer. 

‘If we are successful, we hope to know that in the late fall and early winter,’ he said. 

He also said there were multiple vaccines being tested. 

‘There are at least eight candidate COVID-19 vaccines in clinical development. The NIH has been collaborating with a number of pharmaceutical companies at various stages of development,’ Fauci noted. 

He warned that with the testing could come negative consequences, including the death of patients.

‘I must warn that there is also the possibility of negative consequences where certain vaccines can actually enhance the negative effect of the infection,’ he said.

He also warned as states begin to reopen – thus pulling back on stay-at-home orders and social distancing – ‘you will see some cases reappear.’

‘There is no doubt even under the best of circumstances, when you pull back on mitigation, you will see some cases appear,’ Fauci warned, adding the U.S. must be prepared for ‘when the inevitable return of infections occurs.’

‘We will start to see little spikes that might turn into outbreaks,’ he noted.

Fauci’s testimony came as the United States has more than 1.38 million cases of the coronavirus and more than 81,000 deaths.

The doctor, an infectious disease expert, warned the death rate is likely higher than that.

‘I think you are correct that the number is likely higher,’ he said in response to a question from Senator Bernie Sanders. ‘I don’t know exactly the percent higher but almost certainly its higher.’ 

He noted that, for example, people that died at home early on in the outbreak in places like New York weren’t counted as coronavirus victims.  

Testing to ramp up in fall 

Admiral Brett Giroir, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, said as the states went through the phases of reopening and the flu season began, more testing would be needed.

The Trump administration offered guidelines for the three phases of states to reopen that would allow for the gradual return to restaurant reopenings, going back to work and schools reopening. 

Many states have started to reopen their economies without meeting the White House threshold. 

Giroir oversees testing on the virus and said by September, ‘we project that our nation will be capable of performing 40-50 million tests per month.’ 

‘As we progressively open, as communities go through phase one and then into phase two, and certainly those numbers will need to go up significantly again in the fall. When we potentially have influenza circulating with with COVID,’ he said. 

Fauci, Giroir and other members of the Coronavirus Task Force testified remotely after choosing to self-quarantine after being in contact with Karen Miller, the press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence who tested positive for the coroanvirus last week. Miller is the spokesperson for the Coronavirus Task Force and attended multiple meetings of it. 

Fauci said before the hearing began he was going to warn senators of the threat that comes with reopening country too quickly. President Donald Trump has pushed America to get back in business as the economy tanked and more than 30 million people are unemployed.  

In an email to the New York Times, Fauci said his main intention was to get across ‘the danger of trying to open the country prematurely.’

He added: ‘If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: “Open America Again,” then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.’   

Fauci has been largely out of public view in the last week since the president put a pause on the coronavirus task force briefings. 

Experts have said that rather than a second wave striking in the fall, America could be seized upon by a series of wavelets – acute eruptions of the virus in communities throughout the country which will be impossible to predict. 

Trump’s efforts to project a confident front in setting out his ‘Open America Again’ strategy have been hampered by the virus hitting the West Wing.  

Two White House staffers tested positive, Miller the Pence spokeswoman, and a U.S. Navy officer serving as one of Trump’s valets. 

Fauci’s words of warning

At several points in the two and half hour hearing, Fauci warned that the virus was not under control and a second wave is ‘entirely conceivable and possible.’

He said the key to battling any second wave would be the country’s ability to respond to it quickly.

‘I hope that if we do have the threat of a second wave, we will be able to deal with it very effectively to prevent it from becoming an outbreak not only worse than now but much, much less,’ he said.

And when Senator Elizabeth Warren asked him if the outbreak was under control in the United States, he responded: ‘If you think that we have it completely under control, we don’t.’

Fauci also warned that a second wave could be worse.

‘If we do not respond in an adequate way, when the fall comes, given that it is without a doubt that there will be infections that will be in the community, then we run the risk of having a resurgence,’ he said.

‘I would hope, by that point in time, in the fall, that we have more than enough to respond adequately. But if we don’t, there will be problems,’ he added.

Mixed messages from health experts versus President Trump

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut pressed CDC director Robert Redfield on when his state could see official federal guidelines on reopening businesses.

‘We’re reopening Connecticut in five days so this guidance isn’t going to be useful to us in two weeks,’ he said. ‘When are we going to get this guidance?’

Redfield reassured Murphy that anyone in the state could call the CDC for help. ‘The CDC stands by to give technical guidance to your state or any state. I do anticipate this broader guidance to be posted on the CDC website soon.’

‘”Soon” isn’t terribly helpful,’ Murphy responded.

Murphy, a longtime critic of the president, said it was ‘infuriating’ to hear warnings from the medical experts of the dangers of reopening the country too quickly after President Trump declared the United States has prevailed over the coronavirus.

‘It’s infuriating to hear experts warn about reopening too soon hours after the president declared we’ve prevailed. over the coronavirus. I will tell you that’s much harder on state leaders to key social distancing restrictions in place,’ he said.

‘I worry you’re trying to have it both ways. The state shouldn’t open to early, but many don’t give us the resources to succeed. You work for a president who is frankly undermining our efforts to comply with the guidance that you have given us and the guidance you have provided is criminally vague,’ he added.

Earlier in the hearing, Redfield said the United States was not ‘out of the woods yet.’

‘It’s important to emphasize that we are not out of the woods yet. It remains imperative. We are a resilient nation and I’m confident that we will emerge from this pandemic longer together,’ he noted.

In Rose Garden press conference on Monday, Trump declared victory.

‘America has risen to the task. We have met the moment, and we have prevailed. Americans do whatever it takes to find solutions, pioneer breakthroughs, and harness the energies we need to achieve a total victory,’ he said.

But, when asked if he was saying ‘mission accomplished’ on battling the virus, Trump stepped back his remarks and said he was referring to the testing issue. 

‘No, we’ve prevailed on testing, is what I’m referring to. That was with regard to testing,’ he said.

Many governors have said they are not comfortable fully reopening their states without a greater capacity to test for the virus. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sought the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, was also critical in the hearing of the president.

‘The president needs to stop pretending that if he just ignores bad news it will go away. It won’t. The time for magical thinking is over here. President Trump must acknowledge that the federal response has been insufficient and that more people are dying as a result,’ she said. 

Before the hearing began, Chairman Lamar Alexander, who chaired the hearing from his home in Tennessee after one of his staff tested positive for the coronavirus, warned senators not to engage in finger pointing.

‘This is a bipartisan hearing to examine how well we’re preparing to go back to work and to school, and to determine what else we need to do in the united States senate. Such an exercise sometimes encourages fingerpointing,’ he said. 

‘Before we spend too much time fingerpointing, I’d like to suggest almost all of us, the United States and almost every country so far as I can tell, underestimated this virus, underestimated how contagious it would be, underestimated how it can travel silently in people without symptoms to infect other people, how it can be especially deadly for certain segments of our population, the elderly, those with preexisting conditions.’

Mitt Romney defends Barack Obama

Republican Senator Mitt Romney, during Monday’s hearing, defended former President Barack Obama, whom President Trump has blamed for a lack of coronavirus vaccine.

Trump has repeatedly argued the Obama administration hamstrung the FDA with regulations that made it difficult to develop a vaccine. He also slammed that administration’s response to the H1N1 outbreak.

Romney asked Fauci if either Obama or Trump was to blame for the situation.

‘The president said the other day that President Obama is responsible for our lack of a vaccine. Dr. Fauci, is President Obama or, by extension, President Trump, did they do something that made the likelihood of creating a vaccine less likely? Are either President Trump or Obama responsible for the fact that we don’t have a vaccine now, or in delaying it in some way?,’ Romney said.

‘No, senator. Not at all,’ Fauci responded. ‘Certainly President Obama nor President Trump are responsible for our not having a vaccine. We moved, as you said — because I described it in my opening statement — rather rapidly. No one has ever gone from knowing what the virus was to a phase 1 as fast as we’ve done. So, I don’t think that is something that, once you say anybody is responsible for doing anything wrong on that.’

Romney was also critical of testing in the United States. His comments came a day after President Trump celebrated the number of coronavirus tests performed in the country.

‘I find our testing record nothing to celebrate whatsoever,’ Romney said.  

Fauci slams Senator Rand Paul for ‘cavalier’ comments on school reopening

Fauci criticized Republican Senator Rand Paul for his ‘cavalier’ comments on reopening schools. The senator from Kentucky suggested schools reopen this fall because of the ‘low mortality’ rate in children from the coronavirus.  

‘As much as I respect you, Dr. Fauci, I don’t think you’re the end all – I don’t think you’re the one person who gets to make a decision,’ Paul said during his five minutes to question the infectious disease expert.

Paul, an ophthalmologist who tested positive for the coronavirus, said the U.S. should at least be looking at the mortality the virus has on children, arguing it’s so low it ‘approaches zero.’ 

‘We need to observe with an open mind what went on in Sweden where the kids kept going to school,’ Paul said, explaining that the death count in Sweden is lower than some European countries that practiced better social distancing. ‘But basically I don’t think there’s anybody arguing what happened in Sweden is an unacceptable result, I think people are intrigued by it.’  

He said in rural states, like Kentucky, ‘we never really reached any sort of pandemic levels.’ 

‘And I think the one-size-fits-all that we’re going to have a national strategy and nobody is going to go to school is kind of ridiculous,’ Paul continued. ‘We really should be doing it school district by school district.’

‘And the power needs to be disbursed because people make wrong predictions,’ he added, blaming British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson for starting the trend of ‘wrong prediction, after wrong prediction, after wrong prediction.’ 

‘So I think we ought to have a little bit of humility in our belief that we know what’s best for the economy,’ Paul said. 

He then commented to Fauci that he didn’t believe the doctor was the ‘end all.’  

‘We can listen to your advice, but there are people on the other side who say there’s not going to be a surge and we can safely reopen the economy. And the facts will bear this out,’ Paul said. 

Paul said closing schools for another year would only hurt the ‘poor and under-privileged kids.’ 

‘And I think we ought to look at the Swedish model and we ought to let our kids get back to school, I think it’s a huge mistake if we don’t answer our schools in the fall,’ the senator suggested. 

Fauci asked for time to respond, getting the green light.  

‘First of all Senator Paul, and thank you for your comments, I have never made myself out to be the end-all and only voice in this. I’m a scientist, physician and public health official. I give advice according to the best scientific evidence,’ the doctor said.  

Fauci added, ‘I don’t give advice on economic things. I don’t give advice on anything other than public health.’ 

‘The second thing, is that you used the word we should be humble about what we don’t know and I think that falls under the fact that we don’t know everything about this virus,’ Fauci continued. ‘And we really better be very careful particularly when it comes to children.’