Former chief White House medical adviser Anthony Fauci said it’s time to move away from the emergency era of the COVID-19 outbreak while acknowledging there were “a lot of problems” with the U.S. response.
In a rare interview since leaving government work, Fauci responded to a recent report that determined the U.S. government was ill-prepared and disjointed in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We really fell very short. So hopefully the lessons learned from that type of a really strict analysis of what went wrong will help prepare us for future pandemics,” Fauci told Kaitlan Collins.
“But no doubt about it there were a lot of things that we didn’t do as well as we could and we got to do better not only in the continued response to the current outbreak but in preparation for the inevitability of future outbreaks.”
The more than 350-page report from the COVID Crisis Group called out outdated health systems and “bad governance” as contributing factors to the inept national response.
This is not the first time Fauci, who stepped down from his longtime position as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in December, has acknowledged feeling that things could have been done differently during his time working with the federal government in tackling the pandemic.
In the months leading up to his departure, Fauci said he should have been “much more careful” in his messaging on COVID, adding he should have better conveyed the uncertainty that surrounded the novel virus.
When asked about the imminent end of the national public health emergency for COVID-19 — set for May 11 — Fauci said that if access to treatments and vaccines has been taken care of then it is “important to move forward.”