WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci walked back comments Wednesday he made just the day before on the current state of COVID-19, giving contradictory answers on whether the situation still constitutes a pandemic.
On April 26, PBS published an interview in which the controversial National Institute of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (NIAID) director told Judy Woodruff, “We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” which he defined as a “widespread, throughout the world, infection that spreads rapidly among people.”
While “we’re not going to eradicate this virus,” he explained, “we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
The next day, however, Fauci told CBS News his words had been misconstrued, and that “we certainly cannot say the pandemic is over. It is not over.”
The dueling claims are only the latest in a history of contradictory statements from the longtime federal health bureaucrat on COVID-19:
In February 2020, he said there was “absolutely no reason whatsoever to wear a mask” in the United States; by July, he was suggesting that Americans wear not only masks, but goggles and face shields, despite evidence indicating masks’ ineffectiveness. Critics also faulted Fauci for suggesting that handshaking should be abolished yet sex with strangers remains alright if “you’re willing to take a risk,” championing COVID vaccine mandates, and being unwilling or unable to give a “firm answer” on why the vaccines are necessary for those with immunity from prior infection.
But Fauci is arguably most controversial for having presided over NIAID’s approval of a federal grant to EcoHealth Alliance for gain-of-function research, which is controversial because it entails intentionally strengthening viruses to better study their potential effects, at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which COVID may have originally leaked.