A reflective Dr. Anthony Fauci is now admitting "something clearly went wrong" in the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci indirectly blames capitalism, the U.S. healthcare system, "counterproductive" aspects of the "sometimes-beautiful independent streak" in the U.S., and anti-vaxxers for the poor results during the pandemic on his watch, in an exhaustive Q&A interview for The New York Times Magazine.
"Something clearly went wrong," Fauci told the Times' David Wallace-Wells, a climate-change journalist. "And I don't know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we've done worse than virtually all other countries.
"And there's no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable."
As for the origins of COVID-19, Fauci contends gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China, could not have caused the pandemic, saying, "You could have taken a virus and serially passaged it" from "in your kitchen; you don't need to do engineering."
"What gets conflated is that the NIH funded them; therefore you are liable for the lab leak if it's a lab leak," Fauci said.
"It had nothing to do with what we did, because the viruses were unable to be made into SARS-CoV-2."
Fauci admitted the blame on him for the pandemic got to him.
"Now you're saying things that are a little bit troublesome to me: That I need to go to bed tonight worrying that NIH-funded research was responsible for pandemic origins," Fauci said.
The freedom of thought and opinion is only "sometimes-beautiful," according to Fauci, admitting mandating vaccination actually forced more people to reject it.
"Almost paradoxically, you had people who were on the fence about getting vaccinated thinking, Why are they forcing me to do this?" Fauci said. "And that sometimes-beautiful independent streak in our country becomes counterproductive. And you have that smoldering anti-science feeling, a divisiveness that's palpable politically in this country."
Also, the healthcare system and racial disparities failed America, Fauci said.
"It has to do with the fracturing of our healthcare delivery system in this country," he said. "We have let the local public-health and healthcare delivery system really suffer attrition.
"And the health disparities — racial and ethnic health disparities — every country has a little bit of that, but we really have a lot of it."
Ultimately, economics in America hurt the response, Fauci lamented.
"When you look around, nobody did great, except maybe one or two countries — most everybody did poorly," he said. "Even those countries that had no political divisiveness the way we had, they did poorly. There were gaps and inadequacies in both preparedness and response that varied among different nations."
"I certainly think things could have been done differently — and better — on both sides," he added. "I mean, anybody who thinks that what we or anybody else did was perfect is not looking at reality. Nothing was done perfectly."
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.