Anthony Fauci: ‘We Are Still in the Middle of a Pandemic’

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Anthony Fauci speak
AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
Hannah Knudsen

Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned the world is “still in the middle of a pandemic,” less than two weeks after stating the U.S. was “certainly … out of the pandemic phase.”

“You said last week that we are out of the ‘acute component’ of the pandemic phase. In real terms, what does that mean for Americans?” Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal asked, prompting Fauci to say that “we are still in the middle of a pandemic.”

“There’s no confusion about that. But when I say we’re out of the acute fulminant stage right now, what I mean is that cases have gone down dramatically,” he explained, noting that cases are ticking up a bit but they are “not going up in a very steep, fulminant way and they’re not associated with a concomitant increase in hospitalizations or the utilization of intensive care unit beds.”

 “What that’s telling us is that 90-plus percent of our population has either been vaccinated and boosted or has gotten infected—or both. This is not protecting us specifically from infection, but it seems to be protecting us from that surge of hospitalizations that stressed the health care system during previous eras of this pandemic,” Fauci said, adding that it “remains to be seen” if there will be a virus surge in the fall.

His remark comes less than two weeks after an interview with PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff, where he stated that the U.S. was out of the pandemic phase of the virus.

“So, if you’re saying, are we out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are. What we hope to do, I don’t believe — and I have spoken about this widely — we’re not going to eradicate this virus,” he said at the time.

And that remark seemed to stand in contrast to his remark made in January, when he stated that the world was only in the first phase of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.

As Breitbart News reported at the time:

The White House chief medical adviser, who has remained under scrutiny for continually flip flopping throughout the pandemic and dismissing questions regarding funding gain of function research at the Wuhan lab, said on Monday that the world is still in the first stage of the pandemic, “where the whole world is really very negatively impacted as we are right now.”

Four phases still remain, and those, as detailed in Fortune, include deceleration, control, elimination, and eradication.

Fauci also spoke to Foreign Policy about his decision to forgo the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, explaining he made a “personal decision based on my own evaluation of my risk.”

“I have a number of very important commitments that are coming up in the next week or so, and if I wound up getting infected, even if I didn’t get terribly ill, I’d have to cancel all of those commitments,” he told Foreign Policy.

However, he failed to mention the fact that he still attended a White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) garden party that weekend. The “science” behind that particular decision remains unclear:

 

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