It’s the question on everyone’s mind: When will we be back to normal? And Dr. Francis Collins is one of the highest-ranking figures in the U.S. government thinking about the answer.
As the director of the National Institutes of Health, Collins oversees a wing of the government that describes itself as the “federal focal point for health research.” Collins counts Dr. Anthony Fauci as one of his employees.
In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Collins predicted that many things, including some aspects of business travel, may never return to the way they were before. But he’s more interested in what he described with a laugh as the things we want to do.
That means attending sporting events or hugging relatives.
“I think we’re going to get there by the summer within a lot of circumstances,” Collins said. “Is it middle summer? Is it late summer? I don’t quite know.”
What he does predict is that “it’s going to happen gradually, it’s not like flipping a light switch.”
March 11 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And Fauci also weighed in on the return to normalcy question in an interview with ABC. He said a combination of the continued vaccine rollout and a gradual easing of restrictions is the “answer to get us back to normality.”
Collins is also bullish on the ongoing vaccine distribution efforts and described getting a little emotional when he recently got his dose of the Moderna vaccine recently.
“If there’s a cloud on what otherwise looks like a pretty good horizon, it’s these variants,” he said about different more highly transmissible strains of the virus. Collins said current indications are that the existing vaccines from Pfizer (PFE), Moderna (MRNA), and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) appear to remain effective against the different strains. “But we’re watching closely to be sure there’s not something coming along that’s even more of a threat,” he said.
A ‘terribly difficult 12 months’
Collins also reflected on the last 12 months, saying “it’s been a brutal year, let’s be honest about that.”
Collins appeared on Yahoo Finance back in February of 2020, just as the world was beginning to understand the virus and noted then that “I think at the present time, there is no reason for considerable anxiety in America, because we still have less than a dozen cases in our country.”
At the time, he said Americans ought to be a lot more worried about the flu; speaking about community spread, Collins predicted: “I think our country is poised to jump on those situations quite quickly to make sure those individuals don’t infect others.”
This week Collins acknowledged that scientists back then were just beginning to understand the harmful potential of the coronavirus. He said his thinking began to change shortly after that interview with the realization that many COVID patients were asymptomatic but able to spread the virus.
“This was the worst case you can imagine for a virus that you would try to control with public health measures,” he said. “Because you couldn’t really know who was spreading it, who was the next super spreader without even being aware that they had it.”
Collins also noted a better overall federal response to the virus this year as a reason for optimism. “We now have a White House that’s very tuned into science,” he said. The Trump administration had been “more inclined to be guided by other kinds of information.”
Ben Werschkul is a writer and producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.
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Read More:When it comes to resuming many activities ‘I think we’re going to get there by the summer’: NIH director
2021-03-11 20:46:50
