DATE Monday, September 19, 2022, at 1:00 p.m. ET                   

FEATURING Anthony Fauci Chief Medical Advisor to the President; Director, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

CSIS EXPERTS J. Stephen Morrison Senior Vice President and Director, Global Health Policy Center, CSIS Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com

J. Stephen Morrison: Hello. I’m J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, CSIS, in Washington, D.C., where I direct the CSIS Global Health Policy Center. Today I’m joined in conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to the President of the United States, and director since 1984 of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Many thanks for taking time today, Dr. Fauci, to be with us. And many thanks to you for your decades of service in protecting our nation.

Anthony Fauci: Thank you very much, Steve. As always, it’s a great pleasure to be with you.

Dr. Morrison: I want to talk this time today to reflect on where we are. What is the storyline as we approach the three-year mark in this coronavirus pandemic, as the new winter opens, as we enter a new phase of a bivalent vaccine that’s just been introduced? I’d like to take a broad view that looks at the achievements as well as the challenges. We’ll break it into those two parts. I’d like to begin with the historic achievements for which we should be proud and derive lots of hope and optimism, and which provide the foundation for the future. I’ll turn to the tough challenges after that.

We live in a wildly paradoxical moment, very mixed. Just last night, President Biden announced on “60 Minutes” that the pandemic is over for Americans while commenting also that the pandemic has imposed profound psychological impacts upon Americans, and at the same time that we know that 230,000 or more Americans will die of Covid this year and that we live with the uncertainty around what may happen next in terms of new subvariants.

We often fail to fully appreciate the magnitude of the historical achievements and the degree to which they they’ve changed our relationship with this dangerous virus over the past three years. Our attention often just turns to other pressing matters.

So these achievements are several. There’s science, and the science itself; the technical innovations therein; the people themselves, those who’ve shown remarkable courage, commitment, bravery; the citizens who’ve shown remarkable generosity and creativity; and they’re the machinery of government.

We brought $4.6 trillion of relief to various dimensions of the response through bipartisan action by Congress and through the mobilization of Operation Warp Speed under President Trump, and a massive effort at vaccinating the country and bringing therapies and other expanded testing capacities by the Biden administration in this era.

My question to Dr. Fauci, just to open this up, what’s the best way, in your view, to tell the story to Americans of the historic successes and to keep those achievements front and center as we think about the future?

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