The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Anthony Fauci on coronavirus pandemic and future of public health as he prepares to leave government

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December 1, 2022 at 11:00 a.m. EST
Anthony S. Fauci joins Washington Post Live on Thursday, Dec. 1. (Video: The Washington Post)

Anthony S. Fauci has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984 and has been the public face of the government’s response to COVID-19. Join Washington Post White House reporter Yasmeen Abutaleb for a conversation with Fauci about the state of the pandemic, the future of public health and the lessons he has learned from more than a half-century of public service as he prepares to step down.

Click here for transcript

Highlights

“There are a lot of lessons that we learned from HIV. And one of them… was you’ve got to understand what’s going on at the level of the community. You’ve got to get the people in the trenches involved. You can’t approach something as serious as a historic pandemic in a top-down fashion. And that’s the reason why we had to understand better how, for example, people of color or minority populations were suffering disproportionately from COVID... They had a high degree and likelihood of progressing to a severe outcome. For any of a number of reasons mostly steeped in the social determinants of health which go back decades as the cause of that. And how we had to take special attention to the needs of the minority community… That was a very, very important lesson that we brought into our response to COVID, that we learned through hard knocks from our decades of experience with HIV.”- Anthony S. Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (Video: Washington Post Live)
“There is a bit of inevitability about it, but there is always that you can reflect on, that you could’ve done better and maybe a bit differently. Certainly, I’m among those people who feel that way… When you are dealing with an evolving outbreak like an epidemic of an unknown and brand-new virus, that week to week and month to month, you get more knowledge and more evidence… SARS-CoV-2 in 2020 is not the same SARS-CoV-2 in December of 2022. And that's the thing that we just didn't do as good a job of explaining that to the people in this country and the world. I think that led to some of the distrust in science."- Anthony S. Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (Video: Washington Post Live)
“There are some commonalities in that you’re dealing with a pandemic that is stressing society. With COVID it is all of society. With HIV/AIDS, it was a certain segment of society in certain respects… When you see people juxtaposed on a screen, the 1980s… where you see people demonstrating on the NIH campus… and then you have in the other hand… you have people saying, ‘Fauci, lock him up. Put his head on a spike.’ They are entirely different things. They are not even remotely related. And I think that’s one the things that I welcome the opportunity to clarify because the pushback by AIDS activists in the late 1980s… was trying to get the attention of the federal government, who they felt appropriately and correctly, we’re not really fully appreciating the special circumstances that they were in… Now, turnaround and fast forward to the present time when you see the pushback against sound, scientific principles that defy the principles of public health… that have an enormous amount of conspiracy theory, distortions of reality, outright untruths, if not lies, that are being spread… in the middle of a very divisive era in our society. That is apples and watermelons different, between the early years of HIV and what’s going on right now.”- Anthony S. Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (Video: Washington Post Live)
“There’s no doubt that if you look at the data and there’s now copious data of the morbidity and mortality of individuals who are unvaccinated versus those who are vaccinated… The differences in morbidity and mortality are profound…If there was any advice it’s pretty simple… do whatever you can to get your people vaccinated and boosted with a highly effective vaccine.”- Anthony S. Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (Video: Washington Post Live)
“There’s this lawsuit against Biden et al. and at et al. is me and a few other people, that we were conspiring to interfere with the free speech in the social media. Something that is ridiculous, which I’ve never got involved in trying to pressure any social media for doing anything. But the one thing I can say is that misinformation, in many respects, is the enemy of public health… Clearly, when you look at misinformation and disinformation, that has got to be an impediment to getting a good public health message across. When some of things that are being spread throughout the country do nothing but harm people. Misinformation and disinformation about vaccine safety and efficacy, if it prevents people from getting vaccinated, that to me, is just an affront on public health and dangerous.”- Anthony S. Fauci, Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (Video: Washington Post Live)

Anthony S. Fauci

Director, National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases