Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House coronavirus adviser, recently explained on the “Today” show what went wrong during the novel coronavirus.
What’s going on?
Fauci spoke on the “Today” show on March 11 — the one-year anniversary of the day everything changed — about what went wrong with the pandemic and how the United States failed to stop the virus from mutating so much.
- “We had such divisiveness in our country that even simple commonsense public health measures took on a political connotation (with) people.”
Fauci said he would have been “shocked” if someone told him 500,000 people would die in the U.S. from COVID-19.
- “I did not — think that much worse was going to be 525,000 deaths.”
But Fauci said the pandemic has had a high point — the development of the COVID-19 vaccine.
- “If we really turn on the afterburners and get a lot of people vaccinated … by the time we get into the mid- to late summer, early fall, we’re going to start seeing a big, big difference.”
Flashback
Fauci testified before Congress on March 11, 2020, about the approaching storm of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Business Insider. It featured a key moment you may have missed.
- Chairwoman Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., asked Fauci: “Is the worst yet to come, Dr. Fauci?”
- Dr. Fauci responded: “Yes, it is.”
- Fauci then added: “Whenever you have an outbreak that you can start seeing community spread, which means by definition that you don’t know what the index case is and the way you can approach it is by contact tracing, when you have enough of that, then it becomes a situation where you’re not going to be able to effectively and efficiently contain it.”
Fauci said in March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic would kill 100,000 to 200,000 Americans and infect millions, according to NPR.
- “I just don’t think that we really need to make a projection when it’s such a moving target, that you could so easily be wrong,” Fauci told CNN at the time.