CNN
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Since Dr. Anthony Fauci retired late last year as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, effectively ending his role as America’s physician during the COVID-19 public health emergency, he has been reflecting in a series of new interviews on the missteps. – and missed opportunities – that characterized the response to the pandemic.
How could the United States, one of the richest and most resource-rich nations on Earth, rack up more than 1.1 million Covid-19 deaths in just three years, a death toll that exceeds that of most nations? the other countries?
In interviews with New York Times science writer David Wallace-Wells in April, Fauci, the former chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, gave some of his most extensive responses yet about the decisions he and others made during the pandemic and how they shaped. the country’s response.
A account of the interviews in the New York Times magazine describes Fauci as defensive on issues he felt his own positions had been misconstrued, such as the origins of Covid-19, but “thoughtful and humble” about the pandemic and his own role in it. .
Overall, Fauci said, he sees two big problems that have stumbled the United States in its attempt to control Covid-19.
The first is the divide over politics, which has led many conservatives to mistrust public health recommendations to get vaccinated and wear masks in public.
“I understand that there will always be differences of opinion among people who say, ‘Well, what is the cost-benefit balance of the restriction or of the masks?’ But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether or not to get vaccinated, that’s extraordinary,” Fauci said.
“Why do you have red states that are not vaccinated and blue states that are vaccinated? Why do you have death rates among Republicans that are higher than death rates among Democrats and Independents? It should never be this way when dealing with a public health crisis the likes of which we have not seen in over a hundred years,” she added.
The second big problem, as he explained, is the fracture of the US health care system.
This point is also emphasized in a new book, “Lessons from the Covid War,” published Tuesday by 34 public health and policy experts called The covid crisis group. They met in preparation for a government Covid commission, envisioned as a blue-ribbon panel that would examine pandemic policy flaws in an effort to avoid duplicating those mistakes in future health emergencies.
That commission has not met, and may never have met, so the Covid Crisis Group decided to publish its findings instead. They contend that as many as half a million Americans may have died needlessly from covid-19.
His observation is that the US public health system, an underfunded patchwork of 2,800 state and local health departments, is largely disconnected from the for-profit health care system, which has traditionally not shared data. that became vital to the nation’s pandemic response, such as hospital staffing and bed capacity.
Fauci said that both arms of this health delivery system have been allowed to atrophy, jeopardizing the health of the nation.
But, Fauci told the Times, it wasn’t all bad.
Fauci says that the American scientific company was a great help to the world, having developed coronavirus vaccines in less than a year, an incredible scientific feat.
“How much worse would it have been if we didn’t have a vaccine in 11 months? If it took three years to get a vaccine, we would have had five million deaths here,” he said.
There have been an estimated 20 million deaths from Covid-19 worldwide, but that number may well have doubled, Fauci said.
“So I don’t think we should throw up our hands and say we couldn’t have done worse,” he said.
Going forward, he said, researchers are trying to make the development of new vaccines even faster, by doing it in 100 days.
Fauci says that much of the confusion of the pandemic had to do with the surprising nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself.
“We do not fully appreciate the fact that we were dealing with a highly, highly communicable virus that clearly spread in ways that were unprecedented and inexperienced to us. And so he misled us at first and confused us about the need for masks and the need for ventilation and the need to inhibit social interaction,” Fauci said.
Scientists never imagined, for example, that people could spread the infection without having any symptoms.
“For me, that was the game changer,” he said.
When it comes to the nation’s low vaccination rate (only 68% of Americans are fully vaccinated, making the US 69th in the world), Fauci says he wonders if the mandates ended up making more harm than good.
“Man, I think, almost paradoxically, there were people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why am I being forced to do this? And that sometimes beautiful independent vein in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have this burning anti-science sentiment, a divide that is politically palpable in this country,” he said.
Regarding the origins of Covid-19, Fauci said, until there is definitive proof of a laboratory leak or spread from animals to humans, it is important to keep an open mind.
“But I want to highlight the difference between possible and probable. If you look at what’s possible, I’m keeping an open mind until we have definitive proof of one against the other. However, as a scientist, I could not ignore the accumulation of evidence favoring one over the other,” Fauci said, citing most of the evidence pointing to a natural origin of the pandemic.
One thing that is being lost in the debate, he says, is that we should try to take action now to prevent both scenarios in the future.
“But another thing that’s hard to talk about: Because both are possible, even putting probability aside, we should be strengthening whatever it takes to prevent both, to prevent a new natural occurrence or a new lab leak.” said.
Finally, Fauci says, it is essential to take a moment now and try to listen to the people who have rejected public health advice during the pandemic.
He told the Times that one of the things he is most proud of in his career is that when he was fighting HIV, he received a lot of criticism from gay people because the government was too rigid in the way it organized clinical trials.
“One of the best things I did in my life was put aside their theatrics and attacks on me and started listening to what they had to say. And what they had to say wasn’t just a grain of truth; it was a profound truth. Almost all of it was true,” Fauci said.
“So I’ve always felt that when you have people who pressure you back, even though in many ways they’re in left field somewhere, there always seems to be a kernel of truth, maybe a small kernel or a large segment of true, in what they say. One of the things we really need to do is reach out now and find out what exactly it was that made them back off. Because so many people can’t be completely wrong.”
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