The United States could get the COVID-19 pandemic under control by the spring of 2022 if enough Americans become vaccinated, Anthony S. Fauci, MD, said.
Speaking to Anderson Cooper on CNN, Dr. Fauci corrected the timeline he gave in an interview earlier with Mary Louise Kelly of NPR.
In the NPR interview, he had said that if “the overwhelming majority of the people vaccinated, I think as we get into the fall and the winter, we could start to really get some good control over this as we get into 2022.”
Dr. Fauci told Mr. Cooper that he listened to a recording of the NPR interview later and realized his mistake.
“I meant to say the spring of 2022,” Dr. Fauci told CNN. “I misspoke. My bad.”
Dr. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief White House medical adviser, said the pandemic will be under control when the large majority of Americans have gotten vaccinated or been infected with COVID-19 and recovered, which offers some protection against the virus.
People who have been infected and recovered should still get vaccinated, he said.
“The degree of protection you could induce in someone who’s been infected and then recovered and then vaccinated is an enormous increase in the degree of protection,” Dr. Fauci said.
“I think we can get a degree of overall blanket protection of the community that as we get into the early part of 2022 ... we could start getting back to a degree of normality.”
A version of this article first appeared on WebMD.com.