dr. Anthony Fauci warned Joe Biden that ‘we are not where we need to be’ a day after the president declared the pandemic ‘over’.
The statement comes just months after Fauci compared the COVID-19 pandemic in August to “more of an endemic situation,” but the doctor now says it depends on “how we respond” to the variants.
“We’re much better off now for a number of reasons you mentioned, but we’re not where we need to be if we can quote ‘living with the virus’ because we know we won’t. extermination,” Fauci, 81, told Jay Stephen Morrison, the senior vice president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), on Monday.
“How we react and how we are prepared for the evolution of these variants depends on us.”
Just a day earlier, Biden, 79, declared that the “pandemic is over,” despite admitting immediately afterwards that the US “still has a problem with COVID.”
“We’re still doing a lot of work on it,” Biden said as he strolled through the Detroit Auto Show for a while. 60 minutes interview. “But the pandemic is over. When you find that no one is wearing masks, everyone seems to be in pretty good shape, so I think it’s changing and this is a perfect example of that.”
dr. Anthony Fauci, 81, said the pandemic is not over and ‘we are not where we need to be if we can quote ‘living with the virus’
Speaking to CSIS’ Jay Stephen Morrison (left), Fauci said the death rate was “unacceptably high” and that unless more Americans are vaccinated and boosted, it will still affect society
The White House has since bounced back on Biden’s comments, telling: CNN“The president’s comments do not indicate a change in policy on how the government is handling the virus, and there are no plans to lift the public health emergency.”
The health emergency is currently in effect until October 13 and has been in effect since January 2020.
Fauci took a different approach from the president, saying that while the “intensity” of the outbreak is much lower, the roughly 400 COVID-19 deaths per day are still “I believe, unacceptably high.”
‘[There is a] lack of a uniform acceptance of the interventions available to us in this country where even now – more than two years, almost three years after the outbreak – we have vaccinated only 67 percent of our population and only half of them have received a single boost,” Fauci told CSIS.
Biden’s chief medical adviser, who will step down in December, was more concerned about eradication rates when explaining COVID-19.
“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 century to century,” he said Monday.
“We’re not going to eradicate it. It’s unlikely that we’re going to eliminate it, get a level of control low enough that it doesn’t disrupt our social order and essentially dominate what happens in society.”
The father-of-three did admit that the US is “moving in that direction,” it’s unlikely to be wiped out completely, especially as fall and winter roll in.
He said there is already a “suspicious” variant “on the horizon” and that the constant chance of new variants will continuously change the game unless vaccination rates improve.
Fauci’s words came just a day after President Joe Biden (left) told 60 Minutes that the “pandemic is over,” despite admitting immediately afterwards that the US “still has a problem with COVID.” About 400 Americans die every day from the coronavirus
In August, the doctor said: NPR that increasing vaccination rates could bring the virus ‘to a low enough level’ that it would not disrupt ‘our social order’.
“If we can get the people who haven’t been boosted to get a boost — and certainly those who aren’t vaccinated to get vaccinated — we could be what you and I are talking about right now, where we want to be, like we do early this year and next year,” he told NPR.
In May, Fauci had announced that he thought the US was “out of the pandemic phase,” but quickly backtracked on his statements, saying it was closer to a “transition phase.”
He said at the time that he believed the US would reach an “endemic” stage by the time he retired in December as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), a position he held for 38 years.
As of Monday, the US had more than 67,000 new COVID-19 cases, with a weekly average of 58,500.