What’s America’s Roadmap Out of the Pandemic?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: I want to ask you because you have written about potentially — essentially learning, we might have to learn to live with the virus in the absence of vaccine or therapeutics. And also, I think that you have written and you’ve looked a lot of this at the idea of masks. That’s just one thing that other countries have done which seem, according to evidence, to have had a really positive effect. So, just on that issue, what is your reporting telling you?

DONALD MCNEIL JR., SCIENCE AND HEALTH REPORTER, THE NEW YORK TIMES: OK. Let me go back to the idea of we have to live with the virus here. I am sure that Fauci is right. I am 99 percent sure that Fauci is right that we will have a vaccine because his argument is, look, if the human body can defeat this disease, we can build a vaccine that imitates what human body does. HIV, you’re never clear. If you have HIV, you will die of it unless we give you medicines to suppress the replication of the virus. But that’s why we’ve never made an HIV vaccine because the virus mutates so fast it escapes vaccine. We have veterinary — we have animal vaccines for coronaviruses. We had some SARS viruses pretty far down the line. So, I’m sure there will be a vaccine for this. So, we won’t be living with it forever, but we will be living with it until we have a vaccine. And because you can have problems — serious problems go wrong with vaccines you had high hopes for like what he mentioned, vaccine that actually — that enhancement means the vaccine makes you more likely to catch the disease rather than less. So — but eventually, once we get over those problems, I think a vaccine will end this. And we need to plan accordingly. This is different from 1918. We didn’t know when it would end then. So, we kind of let it kill us then because we had no choice. This time we have a choice. Masks. You know, three months ago I thought it was sort of silly and I unfortunately said so, you know, even in “The New York Times” because that’s what the science said at the time, that masks were good if you could get them on people who were sick, but there’s a lot of psychology to masks. If you put masks on everybody, then the sick people wear them so they’re not coughing out virus, and that makes a big difference. And masks on, you we know that virus is much more aerosolized, much more airborne than it was. So, now, it becomes clear not just from Asia, but from Germany, Israel and the Czech Republic that masks make a big difference in cutting transition and we should all be wearing masks while we’re indoors or while we’re within six feet to other people.