Dr. Anthony Fauci has stepped up once again to vehemently deny that he misled the people of America concerning his prescribed COVID mitigation measures and policies.
As part of a recent interview that took place ABC’s “This Week” with Jonathan Karl which went public this past Sunday, Fauci claimed that the largest misconception regarding him was that he actively misled the American public as narratives were altered, most pointedly alterations concerning school closures and masking mandates.
“So, what’s the biggest misconception about you?” Karl asked.
“I think the misconception is that I was misleading people,” answered Fauci. “You know, to say that I, who have been adviser to seven presidents, and have never ever veered one way or the other from an ideological standpoint, and for somebody to say that, you know, I’m… political, I mean that’s completely crazy.”
However, Fauci did issue a nod to the idea that mistakes had been made, which resulted in various changes as officials for health learned more about COVID and just how its transmission worked.
“Would you take back what you said about masks?” posited Karl. “Obviously, the guidance changed… but you were very definitive. You said there’s absolutely no reason for people to be wearing masks.”
“Yes. I mean, sure, if I had to do it over again, of course. I would have analyzed it a little bit better,” answered Fauci.
Karl then asked Fauci if it was a mistake to try and close schools for the vast majority of the pandemic.
“I don’t want to use the word ‘mistake,’ Jon, because if I do it gets taken out of the context that you’re asking me the question on,” Fauci laid out. “I would say that what we should realize and have realized, that there will be deleterious collateral consequences when you do something like that. This idea that this virus doesn’t afflict children is not so. It does. We’ve lost close to 1,500 kids so far… So, it isn’t without consequences.”
“If you go back, and I ask anybody to go back over the number of times that I’ve said we’ve got to do everything we can to keep the schools open, no one plays that clip. They always come back and say, ‘Fauci was responsible for closing schools.'”
“But a lot of schools were closed,” Karl continued further. “[T]here was a lot of remote learning… It went on– in some jurisdictions for the better part of two years… And we’ve seen the impact. We’ve seen what’s happened in terms of lower reading scores, lower math scores… And who knows the psychological impact… I mean it was a steep cost.”
“It was,” Fauci finally stated. However, “[t]he most important thing is to protect the children,” he concluded.
