Dr Anthony Fauci advises India to go for massive COVID vaccination drive, month-long lockdown

America’s top public health expert Dr Anthony Fauci termed India’s current COVID-19 situation ‘very desperate’ and ‘urgent’, adding that the government authorities need to allocate all of its resources, including armed forces, to immediately construct makeshift hospitals for the people.

File Photo (Credits: Reuters)

New Delhi: America’s top public health expert Dr Anthony Fauci termed India’s current COVID-19 situation ‘very desperate’ and ‘urgent’, adding that the government authorities need to allocate all of its resources, including armed forces, to immediately construct makeshift hospitals and develop better medical facilities for the people.

Dr Anthony Fauci was one of the foremost authorities on SARS-CoV-2. Recently in an interview with CNN News-18, Dr Fauci shared that he believes that India needs to impose 3-4 week long lockdown in order to break the chain of COVID-19 transmission.

“I think it’s clear that India has to take the step of shutting down most of the country, particularly the involved areas and I don’t mean shutting down for six months, you don’t need to do that. You just need to break the chain of transmission, and one can do that by shutting down to the extent possible for two, three weeks, four weeks, and then as soon as the cases start coming down and you vaccinate more people, then you can get ahead of the trajectory of the outbreak because obviously, you’ve got to get as many people vaccinated as you possibly can,” Dr Fauci said. 

America’s top public health expert also recalled India’s effort of helping the small countries around the globe in their fight against COVID-19. “India has helped out other countries, when they’ve had difficulties, so I think as part of solidarity with India, we really need to show that we are really very concerned,” he said.

“Prior to this, India was the largest vaccine producing country in the world. So you’ve got to take your own resources, make vaccines yourself. I know there’s a supply shortage, but try and get as many supplies as possible to rev up your own capability, and then try and get it from other countries,” he added.

Dr Fauci also addressed the concerns of economic disbalance if there is a national-wide lockdown in India at the moment. “When you close for a few weeks, the economy will recover. The economy is going to recover without a doubt. Look at what’s happened in the United States to the economy, it’s recovering very nicely. So I would think that if you’re talking about shutting down for a prolonged period of time, that’s a different story. But if you’re shutting down just long enough to break the chain of transmission, in the long run, it will be beneficial to the economy, as opposed to it being detrimental,” he said.

The American health expert also stated that this variant of COVID-19 is more deadly and added, “the fact that people seem to be requiring oxygen more frequently, is entirely conceivable and there are data suggesting that this virus may be a bit more virulent, or a bit more dangerous, in the sense of making people more seriously ill, than the original virus. Both of those things could explain both younger people getting infected because the more efficient a virus spreads, the more people that can get infected, but also the requirement for oxygen very well may reflect the fact that it might be a bit more pathogenic.”

Marking the road map for India’s fight against COVID-19, Dr Fauci said, “We’re experiencing that when you get a good vaccine, like the ones we’re vaccinating with, you get a higher tide of neutralising antibodies that not only protect against the original virus but there is a spill-over effect - not 100 percent - but enough to protect people from getting a serious disease from the variants. So what I believe will happen is that if India now gets as many people vaccinated as they possibly can with their large population of 1.4 billion people now, even when we get new variants, the vaccination that you do now will very likely cushion or buffer the effect of a new variant,”

The American health expert also urged the concerned authorities in India to learn from the mistakes made by other countries experts 

“I think you can learn from the difficulties that other countries have had. In the United States, when we went through a very difficult time and we’re still not out of it completely, one of the things you’ve got to do is pull together as a united nation,” he said.

“You can’t have divisiveness among you, the common enemy is the virus. So you’ve got to put aside all political disagreements, all ideological differences and focus on one thing, like a laser beam. The enemy is the virus. You’ve got to fight the virus together, particularly when you have a big, diverse country like the United States, and a big diverse country like India, you’ve got to put all of your resources and focus just on the virus, that’s the lesson that I’ve learned,” concluded Dr Fauci.