Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, cautioned the public about the full effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccine, which is expected to arrive by the year-end or early 2021, Microsoft News reported.

Fauci said in a live-streamed Q&A hosted by Brown University: “The chances of it being 98 per cent (effective) are not great, which means you must never abandon the public-health approach.”

“You’ve got to think of a vaccine as a tool to be able to get a pandemic to no longer be a pandemic, but to be something that’s well-controlled,” he added.

“What I’m shooting for is that, with a vaccine and good public-health measures, we can bring it down to somewhere between really good control and elimination,” Fauci told Abdullah Shihipar, a public-health research associate at Brown, during the interaction.

“So that’s what a vaccine is going to do, but it’s not going to do that alone,” he said.

Fauci believes that the vaccine will indeed arrive by the year-end or in early 2021. However, the effectiveness of the vaccine in creating an immune response against the virus would be 70-75 per cent.

He said that the measles vaccine is the most effective of all, which provides 97 per cent immunity.

Last month, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, said that the agency would permit a coronavirus vaccine if it is 50 per cent effective.

“We all want a vaccine tomorrow, that’s unrealistic, and we all want a vaccine that’s 100 per cent effective, again unrealistic. We said 50 per cent.” Hahn was cited saying in an CNBC report.

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