Dr. Fauci Reveals When Most Americans Can Expect A COVID-19 Vaccine

After spending most of the year in a state of uncertainty as the COVID-19 pandemic has raged on, Americans are eagerly looking forward to a vaccine. While the White House coronavirus task force's Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned that we may be in for a rough winter, he has promised that things will improve soon. "There really is light at the end of the tunnel," he recently told NBC's Meet the Press.

Just how close are we to the end of that tunnel? Fauci said that some Americans will be able to receive a vaccine later this month, while widespread vaccination could begin as early as spring.

"So right now, the federal government is contracted with multiple companies to make about 600 million doses of vaccine, which would be good enough for around 300 million people getting vaccinated — hence, everyone that you would imagine that would want to get vaccinated in the country would have a vaccine," Fauci said in an interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for Bloomberg Quicktake.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that the rollout should begin this month with high-priority people, such as essential workers, health care workers, and those at high risk for COVID-19. "And as we get into January, the next tier. And February, then March," he said. "By the time we get to April, we would likely have taken care of all the high priority and then the general population — the normal, healthy young man or woman, 30 years old that has no underlying conditions — can walk into a CVS or to a Walgreens and get vaccinated."

He continued, "I would think as we get to April and May that we likely would have, for those who want to get vaccinated, the overwhelming majority of the people that want to get vaccinated."

Fauci warned that getting people to take the vaccine could be a challenge. "What you really want is what we have: a highly efficacious vaccine — but you also want 75 to 85 percent of the people to get vaccinated," he said. If those numbers are met, Fauci said that "by the end of the second quarter of the year you could have enough protection to this country that the pandemic as we know it will be well, well suppressed, below the danger point."