Dr. Anthony Fauci said this week that the U.S. is out of the pandemic phase, despite claiming in January that the world is still only in the first stage.
PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff asked the chief White House medical adviser, “How close are we to the end of this pandemic?” Fauci initially said it was an “unanswerable question,” although he quickly added that he believes the U.S. is “certainly … out of the pandemic phase.”
“Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now,” he said.
“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, adding that people may need to be “intermittently” vaccinated.
“I don’t know how often that would have to be, Judy,” Fauci said.
“That might be every year, that might be longer, in order to keep that level low. But, right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country. Pandemic means a widespread, throughout the world, infection that spreads rapidly among people.” he said, adding that the global situation shows that the pandemic is “still ongoing.”
Fauci also said he favors stricter reporting requirements, telling Woodruff, “Yes, I would like to see that.”
“I would like to see a way where, when you get an antigen test, somehow or other, you can put it in an app and just get some way of recording it,” he said.
Fauci’s remarks come months after asserting that the world was still only in the first stage of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
As Breitbart News reported in January:
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.
Deceleration, Fauci contends, has yet to happen, as the U.S. has experienced another spike in cases with the omicron variant of the virus.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director made waves this week after canceling his appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, citing his personal risk of catching the Chinese coronavirus. However, that did not stop him from enjoying himself in the summer of 2020, when a maskless Fauci contradicted his own advice by attending a Washington Nationals baseball game, indeed, surviving the event:
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