RELATED: America Will “Feel Close to Normal” by This Exact Date, COVID Expert Says. “I hope that next Mother’s Day, we’re going to see a dramatic difference than what we’re seeing right now,” Fauci told Stephanopoulos. “I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can. And there’s some conditions to that.” In order to get to that point of normalcy, Fauci said the “overwhelming proportion of the population” needs to get vaccinated. “When that happens, the virus doesn’t really have any place to go. There aren’t a lot of vulnerable people around,” he explained. “And where there are not a lot of vulnerable people around, you’re not going to see a surge. You’re not going to see the kinds of numbers we see now.” Thankfully, with the help of the Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) thinks we will eventually “approach what we use to remember as normal before all of this tragedy happened.” RELATED: Dr. Fauci Says These Are the Two Places He Won’t Go Right Now. Keeping with the theme of Mother’s Day, Stephanopoulos asked Fauci what his message was to pregnant women and women trying to have kids, who might feel apprehensive about COVID vaccines. “Well, if you look at the data, George, there doesn’t seem to be a problem at all,” Fauci said. He noted that there’s been “literally, tens and tens of thousands of women who are pregnant who’ve gotten vaccinated.” He also assured his listeners that “there are no red flags. Nothing that looks like there’s going to be any problem.“ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb On May 5, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended in a webinar that pregnant women get vaccinated when the benefits of the jab “outweigh the potential risks.” The WHO added, “It is not necessary to conduct pregnancy testing prior to vaccination; nor is there a need to delay or terminate pregnancy because of vaccination.” Last month, emergency medicine physician Leana Wen, MD, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the U.S. is moving closer to where it once was. “We’re seeing restrictions being lifted in so many parts of the country, we’re seeing travel at an all-time high. People are already going back to pre-pandemic normal,” Wen said. “We have a pretty narrow window of opportunity to make clear what the benefits of vaccinations are. We know that these vaccines are really effective at preventing severe disease.” RELATED: Dr. Fauci Says “Herd Immunity” Is No Longer the Goal With COVID—This Is. On May 2, Ashish Jha, MD, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, gave a more promising projection for when the U.S. will “feel close to normal” again. “If we keep vaccinating Americans, I think by July 1, 2021, you’re going to see much of America feel close to normal,” he told This Week co-anchor Martha Raddatz. “Look, it won’t be 100 percent, [but] this can be pretty close to what life was like before the pandemic.”
