‘Every country needed to be on top of the disease’
THE man who’s advised the United States through the COVID-19 pandemic has issued a stark warning for Australia and the rest of the world.
Dr Anthony Fauci said it didn’t matter if Australia had coronavirus cases under control, every country needed to be on top of the disease in order to maintain the threat.
The top infectious diseases expert in the US spoke about how Australia had handled the pandemic in a lecture for the University of New South Wales on Wednesday.
He praised the “capability and uniformity of citizens” in Australia when it went into lockdown and emerged from it.
“When you shut down, you really shut down, very effectively,” he said via video for the Inaugural David Cooper Lecture.
“Then when you had a situation where you opened up again, you responded quickly and efficiently and I’m sure not everybody in Australia was excited about having to shut things down but you did it in a way which was really quite uniform, but importantly, effective.
“If you look at the United States ... we had an inconsistent response which allowed us, unfortunately for us, to really do worse than essentially any other country, which is really extremely unfortunate.”
Dr Fauci said the US death tally hitting over 555,000 and up to 80,000 new infections recorded at the weekend showed just how badly his country was doing.
“Australia I believe was one of the better countries in the entire world in how you responded and unfortunately we have not done nearly as well as we should have done,” he said.
US President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser said while he was a loyal American, he was a realist, and there was one main issue threatening his country’s safety.
“It is unfortunate we are living right now in our country in a time of profound divisiveness. I think anyone who pays any attention to what’s going on in the United States sees that,” he said.
“In some respects, that happens in different countries, but when it spills over in the middle of the worst, most historic pandemic of a respiratory disease that we’ve had in over 100 years, if there’s anything you want, is you want people to be pulling together in uniform.
“It’s sort of like being in a war, the common enemy is the virus and we should all be fighting the virus, and not fighting with each other, so that has really been one of the real difficulties we’ve had to face.”