Anthony Fauci, the country's leading infectious diseases expert, said Tuesday he does not see the U.S. mandating a COVID-19 vaccine.
"I don't think you're ever see a mandating of vaccine especially for the public," Fauci explained during a livestreamed interview with Healthline.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, noted that some offices, particularly those in health care fields, might prevent workers from coming to work or interacting with patients if they haven't been vaccinated for the flu.
Schools generally require students be vaccinated for measles and other infectious diseases before they are permitted to attend courses.
But Fauci said he'd "be surprised if you mandated it for almost any part of the general public."
There are many vaccine candidates in clinical trials, and a few look promising at giving a degree of protection from COVID-19.
While no vaccine was approved yet by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), experts are already grappling with how to convince the American people to get vaccinated.
Vaccine hesitancy has become a public health problem for several decades now, particularly among parents of young kids, partly as a result of growth of misinformation about social media.
Polls have also shown individuals of color are not as likely to wish to get vaccinated, which experts say might be explained by a public health infrastructure that has a history of mistreatment and discrimination.
One of the most well-known examples of this mistreatment of people of color in the health care system is the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which African American men were told that they were getting free healthcare from the United States Public Health Service. In actuality, they had been infected with syphilis and left untreated.
A Gallup poll published earlier this month found in 3 Americans might not find a COVID-19 vaccine available now if it were free and accepted by the FDA.
Sixty-seven percentage of white Americans said they would get the vaccine, compared to 59% of nonwhite Americans. Individuals who lived in rural areas were less likely to say they'd get vaccinated than people who lived in tiny cities, suburbs or massive cities.
Asked what the U.S. can do about people who refuse to get vaccinated, Fauci responded: "They have the right to deny a vaccine. I really don't think you need a contingency strategy. If someone refuses the vaccine in the general populace, then there is nothing you can do about that. You cannot force a person to have a vaccine."