Trump Baselessly Claims Coronavirus Will ‘Go Away’ Without Vaccine
At a White House meeting with fellow Republicans, President Donald Trump said, without evidence, that the coronavirus “is going to go away without a vaccine.” While it’s impossible to predict the future, experts say it’s unlikely that the virus will simply go away.
His son Eric went even further in a May 16 interview, claiming that coronavirus “will magically all of a sudden go away” after the November election.
“It is completely fanciful and not evidence-based to state that SARS-CoV-2 will ‘go away’ without a vaccine,” said Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, referring to the full name of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. “There is no basis for this statement.”
“It is a theoretical possibility that the virus could go away permanently with a large uncontrolled epidemic everywhere in the world, leading to depletion of susceptible people and permanent immunity,” Lipsitch added in an email.
But, he said, that series of events would be “exceedingly unlikely,” since no human coronavirus is known to elicit permanent immunity, and because countries will maintain a pool of people susceptible to the virus for a long time, allowing for reintroductions of the virus.
To state that the virus will go away without a vaccine is “baseless,” Lipsitch said, and to consider it as one of the top scenarios for policy planning is “foolish.”
In an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, also objected to Trump’s claim that the virus would “go away” without a vaccine.
“No, this virus
