Once the media’s go-to scientist for all infectious disease stories, Anthony Fauci largely has avoided the spotlight over the last year—attracting the most press attention for repeatedly invoking the 5th amendment at a Senate hearing in July. But today he sat down for a nearly two-hour interview with Lawrence Gostin, an expert in health policy at Georgetown University, which hired Fauci in 2023 shortly after he left his longtime role as head of the U.S. National Institute and Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Although the conversation, which was webcast, largely avoided politics, Fauci did address some hot-button issues surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccination, and global health.
Fauci never mentioned President Donald Trump or Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), two of his loudest critics, but he defended his actions during the pandemic. “I’m not sure we would change much” about the public health response, he said, contending that there’s “corporate selective amnesia” about how dire the situation was in the first part of 2020. “What you see going on right now is all blame game,” he said. “That is not a constructive way to figure out how you can do better next time.”
Fauci has taken a good deal of heat for schools and businesses closing down, recommendations about masking and vaccination, social distancing measures, and the origin of the pandemic itself. “I’m the bad guy,” he joked. “I created the virus. I shut the schools. You know, I did everything, I did everything. Throw away the key.” (Paul indeed has argued that Fauci should be prosecuted for his pandemic actions, but shortly before leaving office, President Joe Biden issued him a preemptive pardon.)
Fauci stressed that he did not set policy; that was up to governors, mayors, and teacher unions. He told Gostin he wanted schools to reopen more quickly than they did, and he contested the claim that social distancing measures—such as the “30 days to slow the spread” invoked by the first Trump administration--were lock downs. “We didn't lock anything down,” he said. “Were you locked in your house? I wasn't locked in my house. In China, you were.”
Fauci’s critics have also charged him with covering up what they believe was the origin of the pandemic: a leak of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, that received some funding from NIAID. Fauci said he has not ruled out a lab leak. “I keep a completely open mind,” he said, “but I'm a scientist, and I go by data.” A half dozen papers in high-profile journals by “highly qualified evolutionary virologists” support the alternative theory, that the virus naturally jumped into humans from animals. “The people who say it definitively came from a lab leak, I'm sorry, but there's nothing in data that that backs that statement,” he said.
The changing advice from Fauci and other leaders during the early months of the pandemic has also been fodder for critics. That was unavoidable when the science was changing fast, he argued. “One of the things that we've got to articulate better is to get people to understand that science is a process that gathers information that is available to you at a given time,” he said. “Maybe the arithmetic science is absolute, so that in January of 2020, two plus two equaled four, and in September of 2026, two plus two still equals four. But our understanding of the virus in January of 2020 is remarkably different than our understanding now.”
He also commented on more recent issues. The current Trump administration’s decisions to cut funding for global health and drop out of the World Health Organization (WHO) were both mistakes, he said. “Global health is absolutely critically important because of a simple fact that by the very nature of the 21st century, we live in a global community,” he said, calling WHO “imperfect” but “extremely valuable.”
He singled out the rapid spread of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) now taking place. “Ebola in the current outbreak in the DRC was very likely going on for several weeks before anybody even noticed it, and the reason is we didn't have the on-the- ground capability,” he said, making an oblique reference to the Trump administration eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development and paring back overseas field work done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
He strongly defended COVID-19 vaccines, which the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has called “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” Kennedy specifically has assailed the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that is the basis of the COVID-19 shots mostly widely used in the United States, and Fauci lamented that the message has gained traction. “This acceptance that mRNA vaccines kill more people than COVID does, the number of people that believe that is really quite frightening,” said Fauci.
The data the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective are “overwhelming, yet the new thing now is, oh, that's fake news,” he said. “If somebody really, really is convinced that it's fake, nothing you're going to say is going to convince them otherwise.”
Similarly, he assailed a theory pushed by Kennedy that children receive too many vaccines at the same time. “The idea that if you give a lot of vaccines, overwhelming the immune system, is just scientifically not the case,” he said. “What that doesn't take into account that when your child goes to a daycare, it is a petri dish of infections.”
Gostin, who took questions from the small audience and some people online, closed the discussion by praising Fauci. “You’re a national treasure,” he said. But Fauci has faced death threats, and the Georgetown discussion, originally billed as open to the public, was closed for security reasons.