Anthony Fauci Quotes

Getting death threats for me and my family and harassing my daughters to the point where I have to get security is just, I mean, it's amazing

And the reason I'm concerned and my colleagues in public health are concerned also is that we very well might see a post-seasonal, in the sense of Christmas, New Year's, surge, and, as I have described it, as a surge upon a surge, because, if you look at the slope, the incline of cases that we have experienced as we have gone into the late fall and soon-to-be-early winter, it is really quite troubling. We are really at a very critical point. ... So I share the concern of President-elect Biden that as we get into the next few weeks, it might actually get worse.

I'd say we have a couple of people who've recovered, they've gotten excellent medical care and the specific therapy, ZMapp … may have had a role in it but we don't know.

You've got to balance the compassionate-use aspect with trying to figure out whether it works.

You don't want to go to war with a president [...] There's a temptation that you have to fight to tell the president what you think he wants to hear. I’ve seen really good people do that.

One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority. So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth. It's amazing sometimes the denial there is. It's the same thing that gets people who are anti-vaxxers, who don't want people to get vaccinated, even though the data clearly indicate the safety of vaccines. That's really a problem.

I can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down. OK, he said it. Let's try and get it corrected for the next time.

Even before we knew it was a coronavirus, I said it certainly sounds like a coronavirus-SARS type thing. As soon as it was identified, I called a meeting of top-level people and said, 'Let's start working on a vaccine right now.'

I don't regret that. At that time, there was a paucity of equipment that our health care providers needed -- who put themselves daily in harm's way of taking care of people who are ill. We did not want to divert masks and PPE away from them, to be used by the people.

This is material that is quite formidable, that is infecting people with inhalation anthrax, infecting them in the absence of direct contact. You can call it whatever you want to call it with regard to grade and size or weaponized or not weaponized. The fact is, it is acting like a highly efficient bioterrorist agent.

Fauci says 'we need to keep the politics out of' investigating COVID origins

I was trying to let science guide our policy, but he was putting as much stock in anecdotal things that turned out not to be true as he was in what scientists like myself were saying. That caused unnecessary and uncomfortable conflict where I had to essentially correct what he was saying, and put me at great odds with his people.

It may be something that becomes endemic that we have to just be careful about. Certainly it's not going to be a pandemic for a lot longer because I believe the vaccines are going to turn that around.

This would not be the first time, if it happened, that a vaccine that looked good in initial safety actually made people worse. There was the history of the respiratory syncytial vaccine in children, which paradoxically made the children worse. One of the HIV vaccines that we tested some years ago actually made individuals more likely to get infected.

It’s almost like passing a baton in a race. You don’t want to stop, and then give it to somebody, you want to just essentially keep going