President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said the United States has done “done worse than most any other country” handling the virus as the nation hits half a million COVID-19 deaths, Breitbart reported.
On ABC’s “Good Morning America”anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Fauci, “Five hundred thousand Americans, families grieving all across the country. Did this have to be?”
Fauci answered, “Well, certainly some of it, but not this bad, George. I believe that if you look back historically, we’ve done worse than most any other country, and we’re a highly developed rich country.”
The doctor continued, “There were things back then, if you go back and think about what you might have done, the kind of disparate responses of different states rather than having a unified approach. But it’s so tough to go back and try to do a metaphorical autopsy on how things went. It was just bad. It is bad now.”
He added, “I think these numbers are so stunning. George, remember back in the late winter and early spring of 2020 when we were saying we could get as high as 240,000 and people were thinking, we were being hyperbolic about it and here we are with 500,000 deaths, just a stunning figure. The only thing that I would just encourage all of us is that rather than looking back and saying what the heck happened here, just saying, now let’s just go forward and be completely committed as a unified country to just go at this together. This is a common enemy.”
Stephanopoulos also asked Fauci about a Wall Street Journal op-ed by Dr. Marty Makary, a professor at Johns Hopkins who claimed that Covid-19 will be “mostly gone” by April and public health leaders should be more optimistic in their projections. Fauci warned that good news on the vaccine roll out is cause for extra vigilance.
“We’ve got to be really careful and not just say, ‘OK, we’re finished now, we’re through it,’” Fauci said. “We have variants out there that could actually set us back.”
He concluded, “We can’t declare victory.”