Dr. Fauci Just Issued This COVID Surge Update, "It Hasn't Gone Away"

COVID "hasn't gone away," despite what you may have heard from certain politicians, says Dr. Anthony Fauci. The nation's top infectious disease expert made it clear to Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC that the virus's presence remains, driven by its unique ability to develop variants that can elude protection from prior infections. Fauci emphasized that the aim isn't to eradicate the virus – a feat achieved only with smallpox – but to control it. He addressed misconceptions around vaccines, highlighting that everyone, regardless of age, can benefit. Fauci also discussed the serious implications of Long COVID, government efforts in studying it, and clarified the administration's stance on various related issues. Read on to see how you can stay safe during this new surge.

COVID "hasn't gone away," said Dr. Fauci, "it's not done because it's there at a low enough level and there are enough vulnerable people, and it has the capability, which is really somewhat unusual—not totally unique, but quite unusual—that the same virus in the same season as it were because this has been a three and a half year season as it were, tends to get variants that allude protection from either prior infection. So what we're seeing now is an uptick in cases—not way up, but enough to tell us that we're not finished with this virus."

Dr. Fauci says we all "have to make the distinction of looking at it as an acute fulminant, an almost tsunami-type crisis that we saw in the early years, that the number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have gone way down, but they haven't disappeared. We're not going to eradicate this virus for sure. We've only eradicated one virus in the history of public health and that is smallpox. And we've only really eliminated from different regions viruses that have been very troublesome, but that have been controlled by vaccinations like measles and polio. So what we're talking about is control. So when we say COVID is done," it isn't. That's wrong.

Dr. Fauci admits discussion around the vaccines—who should take them, are they effective—is confusing due to misinformation and "It's confusing because we are talking about the relative degree of benefit from it," he says. "When you have vulnerable populations that we have—the elderly, the pregnant individuals, and individuals who have underlying conditions, either immunocompromised or underlying medical conditions that make the situation for them worse if they get infected—those are the ones that get the most bang out of the buck and benefit from the vaccines. However, younger individuals are not completely exempt from getting into trouble because even though the relative amount of seriousness within that young otherwise healthy population is much, much lower than the extremes that I spoke about, they can get seriously ill."

"Do a risk-benefit ratio of what the risk versus the benefit is and the risk of these vaccines that have now been given to literally billions of people in the sense of global use of the vaccine is really quite safe."

Dr. Fauci warned of Long COVID—symptoms like fatigue, migraines, and post-exertional malaise that can develop after even a "mild" case of COVID and may never go away, debilitating you, destroying your life." We've got to be careful because there are things about Long COVID that we don't yet fully appreciate, and that's one of the reasons why the CDC made what I believe is the correct decision to essentially recommend [the vaccine] for everyone who's eligible…is because when you give a message that's very nuanced, it almost becomes gobbled and people say, well, who should be getting vaccinated? If you say vaccination benefits the elderly and the immuno-compromised and pregnant women much more than it does young healthy individuals, that doesn't mean it doesn't have some benefit for everybody."

Dr. Fauci said, "$1.15 billion was given to the NIH to study it" and defended why only now people are being enrolled, three years after the pandemic started. "The reason for that—and I'm not making excuses for it, but the reason for that is when you don't know anything about even the proper definition of long, what is it? What are the criteria that separate Long COVID from other things that might be confused with Long COVID? So you had to have the cause. I agree. Clinical trials likely should have been done sooner."

The host said Long COVID sufferers have contacted him, and "they say, 'We feel abandoned. Biden doesn't talk about it. The CDC doesn't talk about it.' You talked about it last year, but they want to hear more about it. Do you dispute when they say we feel ignored, abandoned?" "I want to assure them that they're not," said Dr. Fauci. "It is very, very much on the radar screen of the NIH, and it is very, very much on the radar screen of HHS, and the president is certainly aware and totally aware that this is a serious problem."

"I can tell you one thing for sure in the Biden administration, we were never under any political or other types of pressure to say one thing or another," said Dr. Fauci when asked about Biden saying on one July 4th that we were free from the virus (we were not). "One of the real confusing aspects of it is that at that time, we were getting people vaccinated, and we were hoping that we would reach that 70% very, very quickly of people vaccinated. And even though we knew that there was Delta around, there was the hope that by the time we got to the summer, there would be enough people vaccinated that we would not see that swarm of cases, and that was not the case. We got hit."

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As Jill Biden had COVID, President Biden joked to reporters that he wasn't wearing his mask all the time. And "the new CDC director this week was at a senior facility, a facility for seniors unmasked…is that fair?" "It can be confusing, but it is a special situation. Do you know that the president that day that he made that [joke] tested and tested negative, so the chances of the president spreading the infection to anyone else is vanishingly low? Vanishingly low. You are correct. I'm not going to argue that the CDC recommendation is that you should be wearing a mask in indoor places in contact with people for ten days. I mean, that's the recommendation."