Dr. Fauci Comments on Russian Vaccine
Transcript
Deborah Roberts: Let’s talk about vaccines. Russia has said this week that it has actually come out with a vaccine now, that it’s going to start inoculating people with this. What do you think about that? Do you think they’ve actually got this vaccine? And how close are we in this country to really having something and how do we begin to dispense it?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Well, I mean, having a vaccine, Deborah, and proving that a vaccine is safe and effective are two different things. We have half a dozen or more vaccines. So, if we wanted to take the chance of hurting a lot of people or giving them something that doesn’t work, we could start doing this, you know, next week if we wanted to! But that’s not the way it works.
So, I hope, but I haven’t heard any evidence to make me feel that’s the case, I hope that the Russians have actually, definitively proven that the vaccine is safe and effective. I seriously doubt that they’ve done that. But that’s what I think people need to understand when they hear announcements from the Chinese or from the Russians that we have a vaccine – [or] we’re giving a vaccine – and people say, “why aren’t the Americans doing that?” Well, because we have a way of doing things in this country that we care about safety and we care about efficacy.
