Kudos! Fauci’s high praise for Kiwi Covid-19 response
Top US doctor talks about America, NZ and new vaccines
‘Kudos to New Zealand!” That’s what Dr Anthony Fauci told me when we chatted about Covid. Fauci is the United States’ top infectious disease expert. When we chatted, he had also just been appointed President-elect Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.
“New Zealand should feel good about the fact that they were so successful from a public health standpoint in containing the outbreak in their own country,” Fauci said. “So kudos to New Zealand.” Fauci said New Zealand had done better than any western country in battling the virus. Just 25 deaths (vs 280,000 here in the US and climbing fast toward perhaps 400,000 before the vaccines turn the tide).
Fauci said New Zealand benefited from both its isolation and its people. “They have the ability to shut things down and open things up quickly. They have a population that has done very well in listening to the kinds of public health messages that have come from the central authorities,” Fauci explained. “So when you talk about who’s done well and who’s not done as well, New Zealand always rises to the top as a country that has actually done really quite well.”
We talked on Friday by Zoom. He was in his Washington DC office. He does several similar video meetings a day. He even has a Zoom assistant to help. They use two laptops, so
Fauci can chat with me on one while his aide readies the next chat on the other laptop. There’s no time to waste when more than 2600 Americans are now dying from Covid daily.
Fauci has been at the forefront of the battle against infectious disease in America since he took on Aids for the US Government in the early
1980s. In addition to his new role for Biden, Fauci said, “I’ve been director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 36 years.” He will be 80 in three weeks. Thin, amiable, with a recognisable New York accent, Fauci is regarded as a national treasure by many Americans. But he and his family now need security protection from death threats because he disagreed at times with President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
He told me some interesting things: ● The US is now considering adopting a more active, co-ordinated strategy of virus suppression, perhaps somewhat more similar to New Zealand’s approach than the chaotic mix of policies that now exist here. “The United States?” he said. “One of its greatest strengths and its beauties is its diversity — geographically, demographically, economically, climate-wise, everything. It’s just a large country: 330-plus million people. A very independent, entrepreneurial spirit of doing things the way you want to do it. Not wanting to be told how to do things. That works great under certain circumstances. It doesn’t
work as great when you’re trying to get a uniform response to a pandemic that is threatening the entire country. So that’s why we were a bit more challenged than a smaller country with a smaller population, an island that has the capability of responding in a unified manner.”
Because many US cities may be forced to lock down soon anyway simply to protect their hospital systems from collapse, these cities could conceivably use their lockdowns as a necessary prerequisite to suppression, as New Zealand did. “You know, that is something that is being very actively discussed now,” Fauci said. ● Fauci confirmed there has already been a noticeable change in America’s Covid response, even before the arrival of the new Biden administration here on January 20. He said transition meetings between the Biden and Trump Covid teams had begun after a delay. “Today I met with a core transition team from the Biden administration. So we’re already seeing co-operation between the Trump administration and the Biden administration.”
Top government experts like Fauci have returned to the talk show circuit. Now, expert medical leadership is much more visible. “Well, you know, it certainly appears that way,” Fauci agreed. “Because the doctors — myself and Dr Birx and Dr Adams and Dr Hahn and Dr Giroir — seem to be out there more, more exposed and talking about important issues. So I think you’re on to something. I think you’re right. There has been more of a loosening up of the communications to communicate to the American people what they need to do to stay safe?”
● Fauci was “surprised” by the high success rate of the Covid vaccine results. “I have to be honest. I was very pleasantly surprised. I was expecting that at best we would do 70 per cent. I would’ve loved 75. I didn’t imagine in my wildest dreams that we would get almost as good as what you get with measles, which is the gold standard of efficacy at 97 to 98 per cent efficacy.”
Those numbers convince Fauci that we are not likely to be disappointed later. “I think that even though we don’t know what the durability of the protection is, that it’s going to be long enough to at least get us through a cycle or two of seasons. And if we need a booster, fine. But I think the data showing the 95 per cent efficacy and the extraordinary efficacy against severe disease makes me pretty confident that this is really a home run,” Fauci told me.
● He had some high words of praise not only for New Zealand’s response, not only for President-elect Biden, but also for the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine plan. It funded the development of vaccines and manufacturing before any approval or demonstration of efficacy, saving valuable months. “One of the things that the United States really got right — and I think it should be a credit to the Trump administration — was Operation
Warp Speed. That’s a roaring success. We were able to do it because we have a lot of scientific firepower and a lot of resources. I don’t think New Zealand could be expected to do that. They’re a smaller country and they don’t have as much resources.”
Dick Brass was vice-president of Microsoft and Oracle for almost two decades. His firm Dictronics developed the first modern dictionary-based spellcheck and he was an editor at the Daily News, NY