  The three-dimensional non-compact QED is known to exhibit weak confinement
when fermions acquire a finite mass via the mechanism of dynamical chiral
symmetry breaking. In this paper, we study the effect of fermion damping caused
by elastic scattering on the classical potential between fermions. By
calculating the vacuum polarization function that incorporates the fermion
damping effect, we show that fermion damping can induce a weak confinement even
when the fermions are massless and the chiral symmetry is not broken.
