US President Donald Trump has done it again with his choice of words—at a Townhall event he said that the coronavirus will eventually go away and “you will develop like a herd mentality.”
The president was referring to herd immunity, something Dr Anthony Fauci indicated would happen in the case of COVID-19 after several people lost their lives. When the moderator for the event asked Trump if the virus would ‘disappear’ without a vaccine, he replied, “Sure, with time.”
According to a Reuters report, Trump also said a vaccine could be available for distribution soon, "We're very close to having a vaccine. If you want to know the truth, the previous administration would have taken perhaps years to have a vaccine because of the FDA and all the approvals. And we're within weeks of getting it you know could be three weeks, four weeks,” he said.
Infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci said most experts believe that the vaccine would be available in November or December. "It is conceivable that you can have it by October, though I don't think that that's likely,” Fauci said.
So far 195,000 people have died due to the coronavirus in the US. Trump denied having lied about the coronavirus, a day after journalist Bob Woodward on September 8 released a tape that has the president saying, “I always wanted to play it down…I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
Trump’s messaging about mask-wearing has been inconsistent and he has also touted for hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug as a cure for the virus, though it wasn’t proven to be effective. Trump wore a mask publicly for the first time in July, even as the CDC has begun recommending them in April.
