Fauci's still in utter denial about the early timeline, and about the relative severity of the pandemic here in the United States vs. elsewhere.
The outcome in the US has been 3.6 times worse than in Norway, 6.02 times worse than in Japan. But Fauci, the former embodiment of The Science ™, has ZERO curiosity about why.
The vaccines were already designed by the end of January 2020 (really? sounds like a PLANDEMIC, uh oh), but Fauci behaved rationally at the time like we weren't going to have a global pandemic which would even require them?
Give me a break. That's astonishing.
The entire interview is full of dodgy shit.
The New York Times, here:
“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."...
"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."...
"When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries. Most everybody did poorly."...
"If it took three years to get a vaccine, we would have had five million deaths here."...
Wallace-Wells:
Let’s talk about the vaccines. It was the fastest rollout in history, a
miracle of modern medicine. But we had vaccines designed by the end of
January 2020. The Phase II safety trials were completed by early July.
Could we have accelerated the rollout from there and blunted that awful
first winter surge? Could we do it faster in the future?
Fauci:
Yes. The G7 talks about it: the hundred-day mission, to have
distribution within a hundred days. Not that everybody gets vaccinated,
but that you start doing it. Is that easy? No, it’s going to be really
hard. Is it possible? I think so. ...
Wallace-Wells: But if you go back in time, if you put yourself in February 2020, you’re telling Helen Branswell,7
for instance, that this virus was low-risk and that you didn’t want to
stake your credibility on what could be a false alarm. Do you wish you
had said then more emphatically that this is a real, urgent threat and
that we need to stand up our defenses immediately?
Fauci:
Yeah, I think, retrospectively, we certainly should have done that. If
you look at what we knew at the time, though — we didn’t know that in
January. We were not fully appreciative of the fact that we were dealing
with a highly, highly transmissible virus that was clearly spread by
ways that were unprecedented and unexperienced by us. And so it fooled
us in the beginning and confused us about the need for masks and the
need for ventilation and the need for inhibition of social interaction.
