Four moments in the interview stood out to me.
First: Fauci tells David Wallace-Wells that the U.S. mortality rate from Covid was “worse than virtually all other countries.” Wallace-Wells points out that this isn’t remotely true, and Fauci seems to concede the point. This seems like a pretty basic question to get wrong.
Second: Fauci suggests that vaccine mandates backfired because “you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, why are they forcing me to do this?”
Third: Fauci says that he has been unfairly criticized for government Covid policies that he did not set. He did not shut down schools or factories, he says. He says that “public-health people” including him looked only at the public-health dimensions of policy options. They left it to other people — such as governors, presumably — to incorporate other considerations, such as the economy, into the final decisions they made.
Our editorial scorns this self-defense. Its availability goes to the heart of what I think went wrong with our Covid regime. You can’t really say, in one breath, hey, we’re just technical experts making non-binding recommendations and then, in the next, if you deviate from these recommendations you are an anti-science lunatic. Fauci is not wholly responsible for the “follow the science” mindset but he certainly contributed to it.
Fourth: Fauci says that early missteps on Covid, such as minimizing the risks from it in February and early March 2020, were the result of not appreciating that it could be spread by people without symptoms. “To me, that was the game-changer.”
But Fauci had acknowledged asymptomatic transmission in a press briefing on January 31, 2020:
You know that, in the beginning, we were not sure if there were asymptomatic infection, which would make it a much broader outbreak than what we’re seeing. Now we know for sure that there are.
It was not clear whether an asymptomatic person could transmit it to someone while they were asymptomatic. Now we know from a recent report from Germany that that is absolutely the case.
The same day, CNN reported him as saying, “There’s no doubt . . . that asymptomatic transmission is occurring.”