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Fauci on Covid: "We are not where we need to be"
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert on paper, and one of the most doubted voices on one of the most perplexing diseases of all time, said on Monday that the United States is not where it needs to be regarding Covid-19 following remarks made by President Joe Biden that “the pandemic is over.”
Tony Fauci is the former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, and served as the Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden until resigning at the end of August this year.
Fauci stated while talking with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, that the future of Covid-19 is still dependent on how the nation responds to future variants of the virus. He said:
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“How we respond and how we’re prepared for the evolution of these variants is going to depend on us. And that gets to the other conflicting aspect of this — is the lack of a uniform acceptance of the interventions that are available to us in this country where even now, more than two years, close to three years, into the outbreak, we have only 67 percent of our population vaccinated and only one-half of those have received a single boost.”
He cited numbers suggested that roughly 400 Americans die from Covid related deaths every year, but that this number is down from last year.
On moving forward, he said:
“But we are not where we need to be if we’re going to be able to, quote, ‘live with the virus,’ because we know we’re not going to eradicate it. We only did that with one virus, which is smallpox, and that was very different because smallpox doesn’t change from year to year, or decade to decade, or even from century to century. And we have vaccines and infection that imparts immunity that lasts for decades and possibly lifetime.”
Fauci’s statements come shortly after Biden appeared on 60 Minutes where he said, “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. if you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”
