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Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the White House’s coronavirus response team, acknowledged the Trump administration is considering the idea of distributing certificates of immunity to the virus.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the revelation during a Friday morning interview on CNN’s New Day.
“You know, that’s possible,” Fauci said when asked if he could imagine a time when people would carry such forms of identification.
“It’s one of those things that we talk about when we want to make sure that we know who the vulnerable people are and not,” he explained. “This is something that’s being discussed. I think it might actually have some merit, under certain circumstances.”
A number of other countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, have also contemplated similar proposals, according to Politico.
A crucial step will be the widespread testing of antibodies to determine whether people have contracted the virus. Fauci said a “rather large number” of tests will be available in the next week. But he cautioned the results need to be validated in order for them to be useful.
“Other countries have gotten burned by this,” he said. “They need to be validated. You need to make sure that they’re consistent and that they’re accurate.”
“It’s very likely that there are a large number of people out there that have been infected, have been asymptomatic, and did not know they were infected,” Fauci said. “If their antibody test is positive, one can formulate kind of strategies about whether or not they would be at risk or vulnerable to getting reinfected.”
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