If the government would just get out of the way, let everyone who wants to get a vaccine get one without worrying about making sure the exact right person and the exact right line gets one first. This thing will be over by Memorial Day. Over. Now, look, there'll still be a case here or there. For sure there'll be. I'm not saying there'll be zero cases of Covid, but there will be zero pandemic understood as such.View on YouTube
Key parts of Sacks’s conditional prediction did not come true by Memorial Day 2021:
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His condition on vaccine access was largely satisfied. By early April 2021, President Biden directed states to make all adults eligible for vaccination by April 19, and by mid‑April essentially all states had opened eligibility to all adults 16+ with a site within about 5 miles for 90% of adults.(cnbc.com) While vaccine rollout was not perfect, access was no longer tightly rationed to small priority groups—substantially matching Sacks’s “let everyone who wants to get a vaccine get one” condition.
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The pandemic was not over as a large‑scale public health emergency by Memorial Day 2021.
- The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ COVID‑19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) declaration, first issued in January 2020, was explicitly renewed in April 2021 and repeatedly thereafter; in a January 21, 2021 letter HHS told governors it expected the PHE to remain in place for all of 2021.(aspr.hhs.gov) The federal PHE did not actually end until May 11, 2023.(kff.org) That is directly contrary to his benchmark of “no longer a large‑scale public health emergency.”
- Around Memorial Day weekend 2021, U.S. COVID data still showed substantial transmission and mortality: the 7‑day average of new cases was just under 20,000 per day, and the 7‑day average of deaths was roughly 500–600 per day.(cnbc.com) Contemporary coverage described cases as at their lowest level in a year but clearly still an ongoing pandemic, not "zero pandemic."(cnbc.com)
- Globally and in the U.S., authorities still framed COVID‑19 as an active pandemic; WHO continued to treat it as a pandemic emergency well past 2021 and only ended the global Public Health Emergency of International Concern in May 2023.(who.int)
Given that (1) vaccines were broadly available by the relevant time, satisfying the spirit of his condition, but (2) COVID‑19 in the U.S. was still officially and substantively a major public health emergency with tens of thousands of new cases and hundreds of deaths per day, Sacks’s claim that there would be "zero pandemic understood as such" in the U.S. by Memorial Day 2021 is best classified as wrong.