Can we eradicate COVID? That’s a hard no, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci

While Dr. Anthony Fauci, who became both a reassuring and politically polarizing voice during the pandemic, is retiring from public service in December, he’s still got a lot to share.

In a wide-ranging interview with USA TODAY, President Joe Biden's chief medical advisor and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease says the world might be opening up again, but that doesn’t mean the pandemic is behind us.

“I think that when you talk about new normal, you have to focus predominantly on COVID,” said Dr. Fauci. “We have the emergence of infectious diseases more often than people realize. Many of them are relatively insignificant at a global level.”

Fauci pointed to the Ebola outbreaks in West Central Africa and the Zika outbreak in Brazil, which spread to other areas on a much smaller scale than COVID-19.

“You've got to put it into the context that we are still in a pandemic now that it is in its third year. When we get to January of 2023, that will be the third year anniversary of a historic pandemic in which we've had surprisingly, but unfortunately, tragically multiple variants in surges,” said Fauci. “That really is historic.”

Fauci has spent his career studying emerging viruses and guiding America’s response to health crises like the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and West Nile Virus.

“Could we actually eradicate SARS COV-2, the cause of COVID? I can tell you categorically, the answer to that is going to be no. Because we've only eradicated from the face of the earth one significant pathogen and that's smallpox,” says Fauci. “We did that because smallpox, when you get infected or vaccinated with it, you get immunity that lasts at least decades, and maybe lifelong, and smallpox doesn't vary very much."

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Fauci says America’s best protection against COVID-19 is mass vaccination.

“For reasons we still don't fully appreciate, the immunity that you get from prior infection, as well as from vaccination lasts literally for months to a year and not lifetime, like we see with smallpox. So we are going to have to get this virus to a low enough level that it doesn't disrupt the social order right now. We're not there yet.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. is still seeing an average more than 88,000 cases per day and just under 400 deaths per day.

“Now, that is what the new normal is going to be. It's not going be an absence of COVID, it's going to  be a living with it at a low enough level that it doesn't disrupt us," Fauci says.

While Fauci doesn’t think masks in outdoor settings are necessary, he says it’s prudent to wear a mask indoors if the community has a high number of COVID-19 cases. He says more vaccinations and booster shots are the best defense against the virus.

“We are doing very poorly as a nation in getting people vaccinated and boosted for a wealthy country like the United States that has all of the resources necessary to get everybody vaccinated and boosted up to date. We rank relatively low in the world.”

As of August 2022, 67% of the American population has been fully vaccinated, according to Fauci.

He added the country is doing "very poorly” when it comes to the percentage of younger children who are vaccinated.

Only 37% of American children aged 5-11 have received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The number is much lower for those ages 6 months to 4years, at just 6%.

Fauci said a universal coronavirus vaccine – one that combats all variants --  was the highest priority in the scientific community. 

He also clarified details about the emergence of monkeypox, which the Biden administration declared a public health emergency this summer.

“Monkeypox is very closely related to smallpox,” explained Dr. Fauci. “Decades ago when the entire world, including myself, were vaccinated against smallpox, when smallpox was a global threat, there was no monkey pox in humans.”

Fauci said monkeypox likely existed in some animal species at that time, but it was not prevalent in people.

“Because people were protected against smallpox, because of the smallpox  vaccination, that was universal. We just didn't see human monkeypox. However, because we eradicated smallpox and the vaccinations globally stopped somewhere in the end of the '70s, then anybody born after that time is not protected against smallpox. And, as a matter of fact, by definition, is not protected against monkeypox.”

Fauci said there is no way to predict whether pandemics caused by emerging viruses could be something we see more regularly.

“It is noteworthy that about 75% of all the new emerging infections are what we call zoonotic. They emerge from an animal reservoir. Flu does that. HIV does that. Ebola does that. COVID does that. And when that happens, sometimes it's a curiosity and it doesn't spread widely, but every once in a while, it's a pandemic and that's when you get global spread. And that's what we're seeing now with COVID."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Dr. Fauci on eradicating COVID-19 and emerging viruses like monkeypox