Fauci admits he has 'no easy answer' on COVID coming across the border
uh we have dr anthony fauci with us as chief medical advisor to the president united states dr very good to have you good to be with you neil thank you for having me what do you make of what ireland's doing i know i'm just dumping this on you it just flashed here uh overreaction how do you feel about you know it it could be an overreaction but i don't think we can make any comment about that neil there's a lot of unknowns here and literally in real time as the as the days go by and sometimes as you've just shown with that recent flash you got as the hours go by you learn more and more but i can say for us here right now with regard to what we need to know about transmissibility about severity of disease about relatively speaking whether the vaccines and or the boosters what kind of protection we get those things are still actually being sorted out we're getting a lot of good information from our south african colleagues who have the bulk of the cases now but as you've mentioned on the top of the of this introduction to me that we're starting to see cases right here in the united states and we'll be learning in real time from our own cases so i i don't think that we should be able to say what's being done in one country is an overreaction or an underreaction really i don't think it's we can make that kind of determination it's probably too early as well doctor i assume to to to peg or relate some of these cases because at least it was thought certainly in terms of the first guy we heard about in in minnesota who had taken a trip uh you know to africa uh and it would have been exposed to it but a lot of these other cases involve people who had never been should that worry us well what it tells us neil is that this community spread and once you have community spread then you're going to be seeing cases popping up all over the place because they're under the radar screen because we know from delta that a substantial proportion of cases can be without symptoms and can spread to another person even if you don't have any symptoms so the very fact the thing that caught my attention neil was the person who was in new york city right and then got infected there because there was no contact with anyone that he could identify was in for example south southern africa and he himself certainly was not so that's the kind of thing that raises some alarms about the under the radar screen spreading throughout the country which tells me neil that we are going to start seeing in the coming days more and more states and more and more cases that are going to have it there's no doubt about that so let's talk a little bit about how you know if you have it uh in other words when people get a coveted test doctor it will now this be among the things you look for this particular variant gives a certain signature on a pcr test neil so that even if you don't specifically look for this variant when you do a standard pcr it has a certain signature that something is missing in the binding of this particular uh primer that we say when you do a molecular test it's called a spike gene dropout which means that if you're looking for one type and you don't see something there you know this is highly suspicious of being omicron the good news about that is that the standard pcrs that we use we'll pick it up and that's really how this the california case got picked up and the same thing with the new york cases you know you had mentioned uh earlier in some interviews about uh you hope that maybe one of the good things that would come of this i'm paraphrasing here is that people who are not vaccinated would get vaccinated but i hear as much from people who have not been vaccinated who are now sure as hell they will not get vaccinated because if if if you can get this and and you hear about you know a breakthrough cases my own included doctor and i was fully vaccinated and they hear about this the people who have the full vaccination even get the booster shots and still getting hit with not necessarily this variant um they're saying no no i'm not going to bother what do you tell them yeah but the thing about that neil is that you don't want to get into a situation where you don't fully realize that very very often and the data clearly show that if you were vaccinated and get a breakthrough infection which there are a lot of breakthrough infections you yourself mentioned your own personal situation however we know now that when people are vaccinated even when they do get a breakthrough infection and compare the likelihood of their going on to a serious hospitalization and even death is much much greater in an unvaccinated person than in a vaccinated person so although i can understand a person saying well if there are breakthrough infections why i should get why should i get vaccinated they need to understand that even if they do get infected if they were not vaccinated they might have had a much much more serious course and if you look at the the whole cohort of patients who get infected there's no doubt recent data neil just came out that if you are unvaccinated and get infected versus vaccinated and get infected the the likelihood of your getting hospitalized is much much higher if you are in the unvaccinated group yeah and i was accident and it was relatively mild i tried to milk it for all the attention i could doctor but the fact of the matter is that it was it could have been a lot worse could i get your take on whether we've gotten to this natural immunity point in this country i was talking about dr marty mccary earlier in the last hour doctor about the the fact that there are you know probably enough americans now who have a natural resistance to this um but what i also hear from many americans is they assume they do without confirmation of that where where are you on this and whether we've hit that inflection point well there are some knowns in some unknowns neil for sure you can't deny that many people in fact maybe most people who wind up getting infected and recover do have a considerable degree of immunity that would protect them against re-infection the thing we don't know because we have not studied it that carefully as well as we've studied the immune response to vaccination and to booster which we have a really good handle on that is that as a person gets vaccinated it gets infected and gets mild symptoms versus a person who gets infected and gets moderate to severe symptoms or a person who gets infected and maybe is so sick to have to go to the hospital is the level of protection following their recovery very different see we don't know that so you can't assume that when you get infected you all have a uniform level of high degree of protection that's not to take away from the fact that you can't deny that people who do get infected and recover clearly have a degree of protection the one thing you do know that if you get infected and recover and then get vaccinated the level of your protection after that is as high as you can imagine it's really really way up there and that's the reason why the cdc still recommends that if you've been infected and recovered that you do get vaccinated not denying that you do have a degree of protection when you do get fact uh infected well where are you on the vaccine i know you're personally recommending vaccinations for people um it seemed that the president his remarks yesterday uh had a rather tame approach to this and not not calling for mandates per se even though he's had a fight with the courts on how far he can go but urging americans to get vaccinated uh so where does dr anthony fought to stand on forcing the issue you know i i never liked the idea of forcing the issue but the only thing neil that's important is that we know the importance of vaccination we know the data are overwhelming in protecting people particularly against severe disease hospitalization and certainly deaths i would hope that even now as we enter into this new era of omicron that people would appreciate why it's so important you know you hear me talk a lot about boosters neil and the reason i do is that if you look at the vaccination we were vaccinated against the original what we call ancestral or wuhan strain yet when you get antibodies from that vaccination and when you get boosted the level of protection spills over to delta to alpha to beta and very likely will spill over also to omicron so that's the reason why i'm saying for sure though doctor that i i know the fda is aiming for a speedy review of omicron vaccines and drugs but do we know that the the the treatments that already out there the vaccines that are already out there the booster shots are we out there can address this no we are not i'm always honest with you neil we have not proven it in the field but if you look at the level of antibodies that are induced by vaccine and by boost literally within the next week or so maybe a week to 10 days we'll be able to assay those antibodies on the omicron strain and the omicron variant so we'll be able to know the level of the degree of neutralization but if you make an extrapolation and look at vaccine-induced antibodies and even convalescent antibodies from being infected when they go up they do spill over to other variants so you can make an assumption that we will hopefully soon prove that as high you get with your response to a primary vaccination and a boost will have a beneficial effect in protecting you at least from severe disease from armor crime but we'll be able to prove that pretty quickly you know here we are the post this pandemic or through this pandemic where uh only about four out of ten americans have returned to work or to return to their physical offices just today doctor we learned that google is pushing back their uh return uh from january to just indefinitely leaving it open-ended what do you think of that well i would like to see people get back to the workplace you know we were successful in getting the kids back to school which i think was a big step forward no one wanted to see the children in virtual learning for a long period of time we'd like to get people back to the workplace and again neil i just get back to what i'm saying the easiest way to do that from the data we know is to get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can and as many people who are fully vaccinated boosted that will cut down on transmission that will cut down more so on hospitalization and severe disease so if you want to keep people well enough so that they don't have to be absent from the workplace that's the reason why we're pushing vaccination and boosters that's also why we're testing people coming into this country um you know to see that they're covered safe and all of that but i was thinking i know you've been asked about this in the past doctor about uh what's happening at the border right now we have about 18 percent of the migrant families here 20 percent of unaccompanied minors testing positive for the covid uh if you use the figure 20 000 and that's a loose figure doctor uh who have been apprehended that that could be up to 4 000 individuals who have coveted what do we do about that you know neil i i don't have an easy answer for that i mean obviously title 42 is still operable at the border trying to keep people who should not come in into the country there is testing that is done i i'm certain it's not as extensive as we would like to see but i have to admit neil i don't have an easy answer that that's a very difficult problem i'm just wondering though would that if those numbers are or need the case it would it would dwarf whatever good we're trying to do at airports though right i mean just looking at the sheer numbers yeah but you know what i think is going to happen that's going to possibly make this even a moot point i think given what we know about the transmissibility and likely a transmissibility advantage of omicron we've seen that in africa with the spikes that are going up once it gets in there it will likely under the radar scheme be spreading no matter what you do to keep people out or not that's the way viruses work we saw that happen with delta i do hope that omicron doesn't have that kind of advantage particularly if it turns out to be serious the good news you mentioned is that even though you can't make a full extrapolation based on a relatively small number of cases we don't seem to see a signal of real severe disease though we need to get many many many more people to follow to determine the severity of the disease you know dr uh many times we've talked in the past you've talked about you follow the science i think you acknowledge that the science can change uh at first you dissuaded the public you know from you know buying masks back in the spring of 2020 you describe the risk of the covert to the u.s you know later that year as minuscule things change the science change to to your point uh but in answering some of the criticism that you've received um you said i represent science so are you saying there that your critics do not and that they they they they don't have a clue could you clarify that no i wasn't being pejorative to anyone and i'm certainly not i mean i i can take criticism and i'm not being pejorative against critics what i'm saying if you look at what i'm talking about neil the only thing i'm saying is that it's important for people to get vaccinated because as a scientist and a physician and a public health person i mean it's very very clear the extraordinary benefit of vaccines to protect you against infection to protect you against severe disease hospitalization and death we also know that masks work there are many many studies now that talk about and actually prove the important preventive capability of masking and for that i'm getting criticized by so many different sectors that are are putting ad hominems against me and what i say that is that all i'm doing is talking science so when you're coming at me with bullets and slings i mean what is it that you're criticizing you're criticizing what i'm saying and what i'm saying is public health based and science-based so that's what i meant when i said i represent scientific principles and if people are starting to criticize that you have to come to the conclusion that they're criticizing the scientific principles that's what i meant i wasn't being pejorative against anyone so the president still stands by you in what you're doing or he wouldn't have made the reference that you're the president yesterday i know he's joking but he still stands by and and there's no change in that no not at all not at all okay i am curious as well about you personally dealing with this i mean you're a rock star at the beginning when this was going on you're sort of this button-down health official telling people you're on top of all that and something changed with the controversy of the origins of all of this what you knew when you knew it without getting into those details have you gotten to the point uh where after dealing with this for the better part of two plus years just saying the hell with it i'm done with this i'm i'm going to step down no absolutely not neil and and you know you talk about you know people put data out like he's this now popularity or not i i'm not running a popularity contest for myself i'm a physician i'm a scientist and i'm a public health person the only thing i care about neil is helping to preserve and protect the health of the american public and indirectly in that regard since we're a leader in the world protecting the health and the safety of the entire world because that's what we do that's what i've done for the 50 years i've been a physician and for the almost 40 years that i've been the director of the institute so whether people on one side or the other like me are unlikely that's not relevant to me what i do is i focus on my job and that is to get us out of this pandemic which has already killed 780 000 americans and i think all that other stuff neil is noise when they say they like him they don't like him some people are favoring him or not that's that that is really meaningless stuff my job is the health of the american public and that's the only thing i focus on so when when when your word was gospel in the very beginning uh doctor and then people say well maybe he knew more about the origins of this or let on or maybe the the 180 on mass proves that you know he's not you know that prescient on all these things at any level does that bug you that people the good many people who trusted you don't trust you as much now now i i can understand how that's the case but i think you'd have to admit uh neil uh that there really has been a considerable degree of politicization about all of this and i have stayed out of politics for my entire career but there's such divisiveness in the country that since i'm a visible person and i'm out there a lot trying to get the public health messages i understand how i could be the target of criticism but like i said it's not pleasant i don't like it but that's not going to deter me from what my primary job is which i said is really looking after the health of the american public so what does the american public to wrap things up doctor have to look forward to or not here is the reality now uh whatever happens with this variant that it's going to be treated like the flu we're going to always have it around there are going to be annual shots that sort of thing how do you see this sorting out you know neil i don't i don't have a definitive answer because we cannot know when you think about infectious diseases you think about pandemic level which we're at then you have a deceleration when the cases come down then you have variable degrees of control you can have elimination or you could have eradication and as i've said so often is that i don't think there's a chance you're going to eradicate this because we've only eradicated one virus for humans in history and that's smallpox elimination is tough we've eliminated polio from this country we've eliminated measles from this country and we've done it by very effective vaccination campaigns i'm not so sure we're going to be able to do that at least not in the near future that's aspirational so what i'm thinking about is control namely a level of control that is well well better than where we are right now because yesterday we had 95 000 new cases hospitalizations are still creeping up the deaths are staying about level but we've got to get that level much much lower neil so that even though we don't eliminate it from the country it is at such a low level that it doesn't interfere with our lives our lifestyle our economy what we do with ourselves that it's there in the background and when we get enough people protected either from getting infected already getting vaccinated getting boosted that's where i think we're going to be whether or not we're going to need a vaccine boost of some sort at intervals i don't know it's likely that will be the case we do know that with the boosters we're giving now we're getting not only a higher level of immunity we're getting a more breadth of immunity which i believe may give us more duration so better control is what i think we need to look for and then we can get back to some form of normality to our lives yeah let's hope so right uh dr anthony fauci a real pleasure having you dr fauci is the chief medical advisor to the president of the united states we'll have more after this
2021-12-04 21:45
