WATCH: Fauci Declares United States ‘Out of the Pandemic Phase’
Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the United States is currently “out of the pandemic phase” of Covid-19, the first such comment that the Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States has made publicly.
Fauci’s comments were made during an appearance on PBS NewsHour after host Judy Woodruff noted “here we are, the end of April, the Spring of 2022. How close are we to the end of this pandemic?”
“Well, that’s an unanswerable question for the following reason,” Dr. Fauci first hedged, adding “and I don’t want to be evasive about it, but let me tell you why I’m giving you that answer.”
“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci continued, adding “namely we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.
“So, if you’re saying if we are out of the pandemic phase in this country? We are. What we hope to do, I don’t believe I’ve spoken about this widely, we’re not going to eradicate this virus. If we can keep that level very low and intermittently vaccinate, and I don’t know how often that would be, Judy. That might be every year, it might be longer in order to keep the level low. But right now we are not in the pandemic phase in this country.”
“Pandemic meets a widespread throughout the world infection that spreads rapidly among people,” he said. “So, if you look at the global situation, there is no doubt this pandemic is still ongoing.”
In related news, CNN’s Oliver Darcy and Kaitlan Collins reported that Dr. Fauci would not be attending the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. From the Reliable Sources newsletter:
The nation’s top doctor will no longer be attending the White House Correspondents Association Dinner this Saturday. Dr. Anthony Fauci had been invited to attend as a guest of ABC News and had planned on going, sources familiar with the matter told Kaitlan Collins and me. But he recently decided to abandon those plans and inform ABC that he would no longer attend because of an individual assessment of his own personal risk, the sources said. Fauci’s decision comes amid concerns that the event could become a superspreader like the annual Gridiron Dinner held weeks ago, even though the WHCA is taking all the expected Covid precautions. Fauci’s decision also comes as the omicron sub-variant sweeps the nation…
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus a pandemic.
Watch above via PBS.
