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Fauci Speaks
Posted on: April 26, 2023 at 18:00:57 CT
Ace AU
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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/04/24/magazine/dr-fauci-pandemic.html
“I’m a physician,” he told me in response to criticism that he had pushed the country too far. “That’s my identity. I’ve 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’t mean to seem preachy, but I don’t want to see people suffer and I don’t want to see people die.”
David Wallace-Wells: Three 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 “worst-case scenarios” 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?
Anthony Fauci: 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.1 And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable.
Wallace-Wells: How do you explain it?
Fauci: The 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, “Well, what’s the cost-benefit balance of restriction or of masks?” But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether to get vaccinated or not — that is extraordinary.
Wallace-Wells: Even 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’s vaccination levels. There have been three times as many American deaths since Election Day 2020 as before. And we’ve done much worse, compared with our peers, since vaccination began than we had before.
At the beginning of 2021, the death toll in the United States was below not just that of Peru but also those of Italy, Mexico, Czechia and the United Kingdom, among many others (and just above France and Sweden).
Fauci: I mean, only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly. We’re not even in the top 10. We’re way down there.3 And then: Why do you have red states that are unvaccinated and blue states that are vaccinated? Why do you have death rates among Republicans that are higher than death rates among Democrats and independents?4 It should never ever be that way when you’re dealing with a public-health crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen in over a hundred years.
As of March 13, the 68 percent of Americans who were fully vaccinated ranked the United States at 69th among countries worldwide.
According to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September 2022, rates of excess deaths were 76 percent higher among Republicans than Democrats throughout the pandemic. The gap was much smaller in 2020; it then grew almost sevenfold with the arrival of vaccines.
That’s part of it. The other part of it has nothing to do with that divisiveness. It has to do with the fracturing of our health care delivery system in this country. We have let the local public-health and health care delivery system really suffer attrition. And the health disparities — racial and ethnic health disparities. Every country has a little bit of that, but we really have a lot of it.
Edited by Ace at 18:19:02 on 04/26/23
“I’m a physician,” he told me in response to criticism that he had pushed the country too far. “That’s my identity. I’ve 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’t mean to seem preachy, but I don’t want to see people suffer and I don’t want to see people die.”
David Wallace-Wells: Three 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 “worst-case scenarios” 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?
Anthony Fauci: 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.1 And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable.
Wallace-Wells: How do you explain it?
Fauci: The 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, “Well, what’s the cost-benefit balance of restriction or of masks?” But when you have fundamental arguments about things like whether to get vaccinated or not — that is extraordinary.
Wallace-Wells: Even 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’s vaccination levels. There have been three times as many American deaths since Election Day 2020 as before. And we’ve done much worse, compared with our peers, since vaccination began than we had before.
At the beginning of 2021, the death toll in the United States was below not just that of Peru but also those of Italy, Mexico, Czechia and the United Kingdom, among many others (and just above France and Sweden).
Fauci: I mean, only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly. We’re not even in the top 10. We’re way down there.3 And then: Why do you have red states that are unvaccinated and blue states that are vaccinated? Why do you have death rates among Republicans that are higher than death rates among Democrats and independents?4 It should never ever be that way when you’re dealing with a public-health crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen in over a hundred years.
As of March 13, the 68 percent of Americans who were fully vaccinated ranked the United States at 69th among countries worldwide.
According to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September 2022, rates of excess deaths were 76 percent higher among Republicans than Democrats throughout the pandemic. The gap was much smaller in 2020; it then grew almost sevenfold with the arrival of vaccines.
That’s part of it. The other part of it has nothing to do with that divisiveness. It has to do with the fracturing of our health care delivery system in this country. We have let the local public-health and health care delivery system really suffer attrition. And the health disparities — racial and ethnic health disparities. Every country has a little bit of that, but we really have a lot of it.
Edited by Ace at 18:19:02 on 04/26/23
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Fauci Speaks - Ace AU - 4/26 18:00:57