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On Monday, February 8, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joined County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in a webinar discussing concerns surrounding Covid-19 vaccines.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is vaccines,” Fauci said. “The way you end this terrible scourge that we’ve experienced over the last greater than one year is to get everyone protected.”
According to the Prince George’s County Health Department, nearly 70,000 county residents have contracted the novel coronavirus. Greenbelt has over 1,600 confirmed cases.
The genomic sequence of the coronavirus was realized in January of 2020, Fauci said. In December, Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were given emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.
According to Fauci, the speed at which the vaccines were developed does not mean that corners were cut.
“It was a reflection of the extraordinary advances that were made in the science of vaccine platform technology,” he said. “And as a matter of fact, that work had been going on for about a decade before the virus was actually recognized.”
Fauci also addressed hesitations minorities may have about receiving the vaccines due to mistrust of the medical system.
“The concern on the part of brown and black people about engaging in a medical program that is run by the federal government is understandable,” he said. “I think the first thing we need to do is to respect the concern of people of color who have hesitancy.”
According to Fauci, the ethical safeguards today would make the Tuskegee study and the Henrietta Lacks incident impossible. Clinical trials cannot be done unless they pass very strict ethical reviews, he said.
Fauci discredited the claim that it is possible to contract
Covid-19 from the vaccine. When a person gets the vaccination, he said, messenger RNA that codes for a single protein is injected. It is not like a live attenuated virus, where the virus is injected into the person.
Brittany N. Gaddy is a University of Maryland graduate student in journalism reporting for the News Review.
