Fauci expected COVID-19 to be ‘behind us’ by now

America’s pandemic response impeded by politics, he says

White House Chief Medical Adviser Anthony Fauci expected the U.S. would have moved past the COVID-19 pandemic after the first year of the Biden administration, but the disruption from the virus has lingered longer than the infectious disease expert anticipated.

“I thought after yet again another year we would have COVID behind us, but as it turns out that’s not the case,” he said in a taped interview for Bloomberg Television and Radio’s Balance of Power with David Westin.

The infectious diseases expert spoke days af t er announcing that he’ll end more than a half-century career as a civil servant this December. Fauci has spent 38 years as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, advising seven presidents on outbreaks ranging from HIV to Ebola to COVID-19.

Fauci said he considered resigning at the end of the Trump administration since he was in good health and “passionate about doing other things outside of the confines of the government.” But he agreed to stay on when Pres- ident Joe Biden asked him to be a top adviser and expected then that his tenure would last about a year.

Fauci decried the political polarization that impeded America’s response to COVID19 and said he would advise his successor — who has yet to be named — to stay out of politics.

“The country has come to a state where even politicians are saying things that are triggering thoughts of violence and harassment against me and my family, but that’s just the state of our nation,” he said. “I accept that. I don’t like it.”

The threats didn’t play a role in his decision to step down, he said.

The U.S. needs to learn the lessons of COVID-19 to be ready for future outbreaks, he said, calling the culture at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “not optimal” for responding to a global pandemic. “The good news is they now realize that,” he said.

Fauci called a lack of transparency from China at the onset of the pandemic “unfortunate” and said that global cooperation will be essential to fighting future outbreaks.

The U.S. initially didn’t appreciate how transmissible the virus was, that it spread through aerosols rather than just droplets, and that more than half the transmission occurred among people who had no symptoms, Fauci said.

“You have to be flexible enough and humble enough to realize that you don’t know everything right at the beginning, and you’ve got to make decisions based on the data as it evolves,” he said.