Dr. Anthony Fauci made an appearance on FOX News with Bret Baier on Monday night for a wide-ranging interview. Among the questions Baier had for Fauci was one about the use of masks.
“Is there going to be a time when we are going to have no masks?” asked Baier. “When is that time? If you had to guess, going to a sports game, going to a theater, going to a concert without a mask?”
Replied Fauci: “That will really be dependent upon how we get the level of the virus in the community down. If we can get, and I have used this as an estimate, it is not definitive, that if we can get 70 to 85 percent of the population vaccinated, and get to what we would hope would be to a degree of herd immunity which really is an umbrella or a veil of protection against the community where the level of virus is so low it’s not a threat at all, then at that point, you can start thinking in terms of not having to have a uniform wearing of masks. But we’re certainly not near there yet. When do I think that would occur? It’s very difficult to predict, Bret, but if everything falls into the right place and we get this under control, it is conceivable that you might be able to pull back a bit on some of the public health measures as we get into the late fall of this year. But there’s no guarantee of that because if we don’t get the overwhelming [number of people vaccinated] there’s still going to be a considerable amount of virus in the community. As long as that’s the case, people are going to have to wear masks.”
