Dr. Fauci Just Shared 10 Key Points About COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic is not a time any of us will look back on with great fondness. Dr. Anthony Fauci won't either. Some of us would rather forget it as soon as possible, but the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief adviser to the president says we need to remember what went wrong—how institutions and public health screwed up—to successfully address future pandemic threats. In an editorial published in Science Translational Medicine, Fauci shared 10 key lessons from the COVID pandemic.

Fauci called the public health response to the pandemic "less-than-stellar" in the United States. "The causes of the failures range from institutional weaknesses, such as the fractionated health care systems, to the disconnect between health care delivery and the public health infrastructure," he wrote.

"The miscommunication and lack of coordination between states and the federal government had a clear-cut negative impact on the pandemic response in the United States," he wrote.

"Supply chain issues and a failure to develop and deliver diagnostics in a timely fashion got the United States off to a slow start in our COVID-19 response," said Fauci.

"Misinformation and disinformation proved to be the enemy of good public health implementation not only in the United States but also in many countries throughout the world," he said. 

"The negative impact of vaccine hesitancy on the part of certain segments of the U.S. population was manifested in high rates of hospitalization and deaths that became clear after the rollout of highly effective vaccines," he said.

"Inconsistencies in accepting and sustaining mitigation methods such as masking, distancing, and lockdowns caused confusion and lack of acceptance of public health recommendations," wrote Fauci.

"The profound degree of political divisiveness, particularly in the United States, was antithetical to a fully successful public health response," he said.

"If there is a success story embedded in the COVID-19 saga, it is in the arena of basic, translational, and clinical science—the scientific bucket," wrote Fauci. "The accomplishment of having a safe and highly effective vaccine going into people's arms—resulting in millions of lives saved—in 11 months from the time that the sequence of the virus was known is unprecedented."

"With its successively evolving variants that elude prior protection and its asymptomatic clinical course in many individuals at the same time as being devastating to so many others, SARS-CoV-2 has proven to be one of the most formidable pathogens that human society has ever had to deal with," Fauci wrote.

The lessons learned from public health errors during the COVID era are "important if we are to successfully address the next challenge of an emerging pathogen of pandemic potential," said Fauci. He urged the public not to become complacent and to support scientific and public health advances to address potential future pandemics.