Dr. Sanjay Gupta Confronts Fauci Over ‘Failed Response’ to Coronavirus: ‘Did We Let the American People Down?’

CNN’s chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta confronted Dr. Anthony Fauci over the nation’s “failed response” to the coronavirus pandemic — asking if he thinks they “let the American people down.”

Gupta played a question from Dr. Arne Epstein during the interview, during which he asked how the U.S. could prepare for the next pandemic and questioned how “the most affluent and influential” country could fare so poorly amid the outbreak.

“We put together a pandemic preparedness plan as we were trying to respond to the threat of the pre-pandemic bird flu back in 2005, and, again it was plan that was a reasonable plan,” Fauci responded. “But what happened when the rubber hit the road on this, and we did get hit, we had to kind of, the kind of response not as well suited to what the dynamics of this outbreak is, and what happened is we had a bit of a disparate response.”

Fauci noted that the U.S. is a big country and that a lot of responsibility is placed on local governments, which all responded differently to the pandemic. He explained that European countries began to open up again once they had a lower baseline of cases than the U.S., making it easier for them to deal with and control outbreaks.

“We decided we would try to take steps to open, and when we did, we didn’t do it uniformly. Some states did not pay attention to the benchmarks or the checkpoints. Others did it fine, but the citizenry within a state or within a city actually did an all or none phenomenon,” Fauci said of the nation’s decision to open due to economic crisis — calling the country’s failure to “row together” a “disparate response.”

Fauci explained that once the U.S. began to open, the country went from having 20,000 to eventually 60,000 coronavirus cases — adding that the death toll is now starting to catch up as well.

“Sounds like it was a failed response? We never really fully implemented a therapy?” Gupta asked in return. “I mean, in medicine, if you give a half a therapy you wouldn’t call it a disparate therapy. You would say you gave inadequate therapy to actually treat the problem. Did we let the American people down with our response?”

“Sanjay, you know if I make the statement that we let the American people down it would be distracting because that would be the sound bite and I wouldn’t want to get the message that I’m trying to get across, where I think we can handle this if we have some fundamental principles that I hope and I know you’ll let me get the opportunity to articulate, because we can do much better, and we can do much better without locking down,” Fauci responded.

Fauci faulted the binary approach that some states took regarding a lockdown and noted that the goal should be to find a place in the middle, which would eliminate surges without leading to a complete economic crisis.

Watch above, via CNN.

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