Anthony Fauci One Year Ago: Pandemic Won’t Last ‘A Lot Longer’ Due to Vaccines

Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has a history of flip-flopping on key issues throughout the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, said one year ago that the pandemic would not last “a lot longer” due to vaccines, yet he continues to favor mandates, promote masking, and advance the notion that boosters could continue to be needed.

“Certainly it’s not going to be pandemic for a lot longer, because I believe the vaccines are going to turn that around,” the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director said at an event in November 2020.

“Vaccines will help us. What we’ve got to do is just hang on and continue to double down on the public health measures,” he added at the time.

Yet, one year later, Fauci continues to sound the alarm over new variants of the virus as the U.S. seeks to return to a state of pre-pandemic normalcy.

While Fauci initially dismissed mandates, concluding that you “cannot force someone to take a vaccine,” he is now in favor of such measures. Speaking in an interview at the 2021 national convention for the Association of LGBTQ Journalists mere months ago, Fauci said more Americans need to be vaccinated and suggested that mandates may be the way to make it happen.

“The other way to do it is to have many, many more mandates,” he said at the time.

“I believe that’s going to turn this around because I don’t think people are going to not want to go to work or not go to college. You’d like to have them do it on a totally voluntary basis, but if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to go to the alternatives,” he said, echoing the sentiments of New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D), who recently announced his decision to force private sector employees to get the vaccination, as well as force businesses to discriminate against unvaccinated children.

This is far from the first time Fauci has drastically changed his stance on issues related to the virus. While he dismissed masks as a “paranoid” tool in 2019 and confessed that drug store masks are “not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through the material” in early 2020, he is now an ardent supporter of masking. Last month, he warned that public health officials “don’t want to do it [relax mask requirements] prematurely.”

“The more people that get vaccinated, the more people that get boosted, the lower the level of infection in the community will be, and then you start thinking about pulling back on masks,” he told NPR’s Morning Edition.