Yesterday the NY Times Magazine published a lengthy interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci titled “Dr. Fauci Looks Back: ‘Something Clearly Went Wrong’.” As the title suggests this is a retrospective and a chance to look at the US reaction to COVID with something like 20-20 hindsight.
Fauci is always going to be his same prickly, defensive, often self-righteous person, but the interview was interesting (to me anyway) for how much Fauci was willing to step away from defending his record to admitting mistakes were made. More to the point, it’s possible that, given what we know now, things were never really going to go well for anyone anywhere in the world in that first year. Part of the problem is that our expectations for what was possible were probably just too high. We’ll get to that but as you might expect, Fauci starts from the position that the US response has been a failure.
David Wallace-Wells: Three years ago, in March 2020, you and many others warned that Covid could result in as many as 100,000 or 200,000 American deaths, making the case for quite drastic interventions in the way we lived our daily lives. At the time, you thought “worst-case scenarios” of more than a million deaths were quite unlikely. Now here we are, three years later, and, having done quite a lot to try to stop the spread of the virus, we have passed 1.1 million deaths. What went wrong?
