Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that “something clearly went wrong” with the country’s Covid-19 response in an interview published Tuesday — but absolved himself from some of the most impactful results of his anti-infection recommendations.
“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” Fauci told The New York Times Magazine when questioned about the “heavy-handed” policies he suggested throughout the pandemic.
“I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that. But I never criticized the people who had to make the decisions one way or the other.”
The former chief medical advisor to the president whined that he was accused of shutting down the economy for relaying the national public health agency’s suggestions to shut down schools and businesses during the height of the pandemic.
Fauci repeatedly came under fire for sea-sawing on several preventative measures, most memorably mask mandates — he originally told Americans masking was not necessary before back peddling and pointing to the practice as a necessity to overcome the pandemic.
The retired infection expert chalked most of the resistance to masking — and later vaccinations — to national divisiveness along political party lines and the fear of being “forced” by the government to fall into public health guidance lines.
“I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint,” Fauci said.
“Ultimately an epidemiologist sees it as an epidemiological phenomenon. An economist sees it from an economic standpoint. And I see it from somebody in bed dying.”
Fauci struck a defensive tone several times throughout the piece — even accusing interviewer David Wallace-Wells of “Monday-morning quarterbacking” when he pointed out that half of Covid-19 deaths are among vaccinated people.
The doctor admitted that the CDC and other government leaders could have done a better job handling the deadly pandemic — especially after the nation’s death toll recently struck over 1,129,000 — but defended their course of action in the face of fighting a novel virus.
“Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t 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’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable,” he said.
“When people say to me, ‘Could we have done better?’ Of course, of course. If you knew many of the things then that now you know, definitely you would want to do things differently,” Fauci said.
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Fauci absolves himself of responsibility for lockdowns in interview: 'Show me a school that I shut down' - New York Post
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