Fauci Delivers Blunt Assessment of U.S. Coronavirus Death Toll: ‘We’ve Done Worse Than Most Any Other Country’

With the U.S. about to hit the tragic milestone of 500,000 coronavirus deaths, Dr. Anthony Fauci is offering a candid assessment of the nation’s response.

In an interview on Good Morning America Monday, the infectious disease expert was questioned by host George Stephanopoulos about whether there was more that the U.S. could have done to lessen the impact of Covid-19.

“Five hundred thousand Americans — families grieving all across the country,” Stephanopoulos said. “Did this have to be?”

“Certainly some of it, but not this bad,” Fauci said. “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.”

Fauci did not invoke or directly assign blame to former President Donald Trump. But he did cite the prior administration’s lack of a national strategy as a primary reason why the virus has hit so hard.

“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,” Fauci said. “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.”

Stephanopoulos went on to ask 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 argued that good news on the vaccine front 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 added, “We can’t declare victory.”

Watch above, via ABC.