Fauci Explains Why Even Healthy People Should Get Vaccinated: ‘It Isn’t All About You’

Amid a time of significant vaccine hesitancy among Americans, Dr. Anthony Fauci explained to Rachel Maddow that it is crucial that more people get vaccinated against Covid-19 in order to prevent the emergence of new variants.

Speaking about the country’s vaccination rates, Maddow asked,

“If vaccination doesn’t prevent us from being able to pass the infection to other people… should we still understand that vaccinating a larger and larger proportion of the population is our best path toward heading off the prospect of the lambda variant or other, even scarier variants that might emerge from this virus, in the future?”

Fauci replied, “The answer to the question is – absolutely – vaccination will prevent that.”

His elaboration is worth quoting at length:

It will go a long way to preventing that because remember, when you get vaccinated, even though you get breakthrough infection, the overwhelming majority of the people don’t even get infected. In those, that do get infected, that’s when you get the situation of passing it on to someone else. But if you allow the virus to freely circulate in 93 million people, and give it the opportunity to find vulnerable targets, you give it the opportunity to mutate and form another variant.

As I’ve said so many times, it’s very clear in virology that a virus will not mutate unless you allow it to replicate. And whatever you can do to prevent it from spreading, even though vaccines are not perfect, they’re an extraordinarily powerful tool and prevent the spread within the community. The more you prevent the spread, the less likelihood that the virus will mutate.

This brings up another important point because people say, “Well, I’m healthy. The chances of my getting seriously ill is very, very low. So, why do I need to worry out getting vaccinated?”

And the reason is, it isn’t all about you. Because if, in fact, you don’t get vaccinated and you do get infected, and you’re part of the transmission chain, and you allow it to infect someone else, you’re propagating the ability of that virus to, ultimately, mutate. And if it does mutate to something that does evade the vaccine, then we really got a problem.

We’re fortunate that the Delta variant is relatively well controlled, certainly, against severe disease by the vaccines that we use. If you allow the virus to just completely, freely go around and go from person to person, you are giving it an opportunity to evade, ultimately, even the people who’ve been vaccinated. Because if you get a mutant, that is very different from Delta. Maybe, much different and much more transmissible or much more serious, then, that impacts even the vaccinated people. So, people getting unvaccinated, potentially, hurt themselves, their family, and the community. But it also helps, possibly, to make things, ultimately, worse for the people who are already vaccinated.

Watch above via MSNBC.