{"id":3351,"date":"2023-04-25T12:33:21","date_gmt":"2023-04-25T17:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3351"},"modified":"2023-04-25T12:33:24","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T17:33:24","slug":"dr-fauci-looks-back-something-clearly-went-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/04\/25\/dr-fauci-looks-back-something-clearly-went-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Fauci Looks Back: \u2018Something Clearly Went Wrong\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

New York Times Magazine<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his most extensive interview yet, Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic \u2014 and the decisions that will define his legacy.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United States, and there were bound to be disappointments and frustrations, and they were bound to get personal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, in December, when Elon Musk joked on Twitter that his \u201cpronouns\u201d were \u201cProsecute\/Fauci,\u201d it felt like the cresting of a turning tide against the man who had played essentially that role for the first three years of the pandemic. At least 30 state legislatures have passed laws<\/a> limiting public-health powers in pandemics. This January, the month after Anthony Fauci retired as the four-decade head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, barely half of Americans said<\/a> they trusted the country\u2019s public-health institutions to manage a future pandemic. The Wall Street Journal named that as his legacy<\/a> \u2014 sowing distrust about public health and vaccines. Earlier in the pandemic, the leftist magazine The Drift mocked Fauci<\/a> as \u201cDoctor Do-Little,\u201d and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, proposed<\/a> that Fauci had \u201cblood on his hands.\u201d Upon the announcement of Fauci\u2019s retirement, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also a Republican, celebrated<\/a>: \u201cGrab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, there were mistakes and missteps, including some by Fauci:\u00a0describing<\/a>\u00a0the threat to the country as \u201cminuscule\u201d in February 2020, for instance; or first\u00a0advising<\/a>\u00a0against wearing masks, and\u00a0moving slowly<\/a>\u00a0on aerosol spread; or playing down the risk of what were first called \u201cbreakthrough infections\u201d in the summer of 2021. And the broader public-health establishment that Fauci came to embody made other mistakes, too, even if it wasn\u2019t always easy to know at the time or identify later who exactly was responsible. Almost certainly, schools stayed closed longer than they needed to. Very conspicuously, American vaccination rates never approached the levels of peer nations \u2014 and the problem wasn\u2019t just the anti-vaccine right. Quarantine guidance was abruptly shortened in the midst of the Omicron variant, when thresholds of community-spread levels were suddenly redefined as well. There was no effective paid sick leave instituted, and the official end of the pandemic emergency on May 11 imperils the Medicaid coverage of 15 million Americans. But three years on, whether you are focused on Covid\u2019s direct carnage or on its collateral damage, it seems irrational to pin the brutality of America\u2019s pandemic on policy failures, however much Americans want to put the blame somewhere. Or on someone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over several hours and multiple Zoom and phone calls in April, I spoke with Fauci about that: how he saw the full story of this historic public-health emergency and the role he played in it. At times, he was defensive, even combative, particularly when it came to episodes in which he felt that his own positions had been misconstrued and on the matter of gain-of-function research and the origins of the pandemic. But on the whole, he was reflective, even humble, especially about the way that Covid-19 exposed the limits of public health and, in his telling, kept surprising him and his fellow scientists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m a physician,\u201d he told me in response to criticism that he had pushed the country too far. \u201cThat\u2019s my identity. I\u2019ve taken care of thousands of patients in one period of my life during the early years of H.I.V. I believe that I have seen as much or more suffering and death as anybody has in most careers. I don\u2019t mean to seem preachy, but I don\u2019t want to see people suffer and I don\u2019t want to see people die.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

David Wallace-Wells:<\/strong>\u00a0Three years ago, in March 2020, you and many others warned that Covid could result in as many as 100,000 or 200,000 American deaths, making the case for quite drastic interventions in the way we lived our daily lives. At the time, you thought \u201cworst-case scenarios\u201d of more than a million deaths were quite unlikely. Now here we are, three years later, and, having done quite a lot to try to stop the spread of the virus, we have passed 1.1 million deaths. What went wrong?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthony Fauci:<\/strong>\u00a0Something clearly went wrong. And I don\u2019t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we\u2019ve done worse than virtually\u00a0all other countries.1<\/sup>\u00a0And there\u2019s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wallace-Wells:<\/strong> How do you explain it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fauci:<\/strong>\u00a0The divisiveness was palpable, just in trying to get a coherent message across of following fundamental public-health principles. I understand that there will always be differences of opinion among people saying, \u201cWell, what\u2019s the cost-benefit balance of restriction or of masks?\u201d But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether to get vaccinated or not \u2014 that is extraordinary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wallace-Wells:<\/strong>\u00a0Even now, when we talk about pandemic response, we focus on things like school closures and masks, but it seems to me that Covid mortality has been shaped much more by the country\u2019s vaccination levels. There have been three times as many American deaths since Election Day 2020 as before. And we\u2019ve done much worse, compared with our peers, since vaccination began than\u00a0we had before.2<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading at the link<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Times Magazine In his most extensive interview yet, Anthony Fauci wrestles with the hard lessons of the pandemic \u2014 and the decisions that will define his legacy. It was, perhaps, an impossible job. Make one man the face of public health amid an unprecedented pandemic, in a country as fractious as the United […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Dr. Fauci Looks Back: \u2018Something Clearly Went Wrong\u2019 @NYT Magazine ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-covid"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3351"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3352,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3351\/revisions\/3352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}