Dr Fauci pushes back on Biden’s claim the Covid pandemic is over: ‘We are not where we need to be’

‘How we respond and how we’re prepared for the evolution of these variants is going to depend on us’

Anthony Fauci said on Monday that the US is not where it needs to be regarding the coronavirus pandemic, just a day after the US president claimed that the “pandemic is over”.

“How we respond and how we’re prepared for the evolution of these variants is going to depend on us,” the White House‘s top medical adviser said.

“And that gets to the other conflicting aspect of this — is the lack of a uniform acceptance of the interventions that are available to us in this country where even now, more than two years, close to three years, into the outbreak, we have only 67 per cent of our population vaccinated and only one-half of those have received a single boost.”

Joe Biden on Sunday said that the pandemic was over in the US even as there was evidence that the number of Americans who died from Covid continued to increase. Mr Biden, however, said that while “we still have a problem”, the situation was rapidly improving.

In an interview, Mr Biden said: “The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with Covid. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. It’s — but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it.”

Meanwhile, Mr Fauci said that “we are not where we need to be if we’re going to be able to, quote, ‘live with the virus,’ because we know we’re not going to eradicate it.”

“We only did that with one virus, which is smallpox, and that was very different because smallpox doesn’t change from year to year, or decade to decade, or even from century to century.

“And we have vaccines and infection that imparts immunity that lasts for decades and possibly a lifetime,” he said.