Fauci on the U.S. COVID response: 'There's a lot that we need to do to improve'

With more than 1 million dead and the COVID-19 pandemic showing no signs of waning, the U.S. has experienced a painful moment of reckoning: The richest country in the world has fared more poorly in responding to the outbreak than some lesser-resourced nations.

“We thought we were ready for this pandemic, and we were judged by independent organizations that the United States was the best prepared for a pandemic,” White House Chief Medical Advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci told Yahoo Finance. “And yet, when you look at what happened to us as a country, we were as severely or more severely hit than many, many other countries.”

According to Johns Hopkins, the U.S. has the third-highest amount of deaths per 100,000 in the world.

“There’s a lot that we need to do to improve not only the preparedness but [also] the response,” Fauci said. “Hopefully, you do that by learning lessons from what you have experienced in the past. And we’ve had some very painful experience over the last 2.5 years.”

Political divisiveness

Willingness of people to abide by masking rules, vaccinations, and other public health measures became dependent on political affiliations and the messages that state officials were willing to disseminate.

Republican politicians have come out strongly against several government COVID guidelines, and some have even accused Dr. Fauci of lying about the origins of the virus. During then-President Trump’s time in office, Fauci notoriously pushed back against the president’s optimistic outlooks about the virus’s trajectory, and began using security after receiving death threats.

“We are a very big country, a diverse country,” Fauci said. “We have 50 states and additional territories. What had happened, right from the very beginning, has been a little bit of a discordance in response of different states and different regions of the country to what should have been somewhat of a more unified response in addressing how we are going to try and control this outbreak.”

As a result, vaccination uptake in the U.S. has been less than ideal. Just 67.4% of Americans are fully vaccinated and 48.5% of those individuals have received a booster dose. States that voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election are significantly more likely to have lower vaccination rates.

“We as a rich country have the accessibility of as much vaccine as we need,” Fauci said, adding: “If you’re dealing with the common enemy of a deadly virus that has already killed over one million people in this country, I would have hoped there would have been much more of a unified response directing all of our efforts against what I call the common enemy — the virus — as opposed to the divisiveness that we’ve unfortunately experienced in this country, which I believe has hindered the most effective response to this outbreak.”

Much of the vitriol is fueled by disinformation — that is, proponents who intentionally disseminate misinformation that counters scientific data. These conspiracy theories range from Bill Gates being responsible for microchips being planted in the COVID vaccines to the virus being a part of a bigger plot by Big Pharma to the virus not even existing to begin with.

Fauci, who will be stepping down from his White House post and from heading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases later this year, said his successor will need to have the skills to push back against misinformation and disinformation, which significantly hampered the U.S response.

“The advice I strongly would give is stick with the science and the evidence and the facts,” Fauci said. “Realize that as you learn more and more — and we’re still learning every day, every week, every month — that things change, the evidence changes, the data change. And you’ve got to be flexible enough to be able to appropriately and adequately communicate to the American public, without confusing them, how your recommendations or the things you are providing for guidelines, could actually change over time depending on the evolution of the scientific data.”

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