Top 15 Anthony Fauci Quotes

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

We have immunological data and you have now clinical efficacy data. Everybody was asking the question: Where’s the clinical efficacy data? Now it has come out with the CDC MMWR this morning. So, we know it’s safe. We know that it is effective. So, my message and my final message — maybe the final message I give you from this podium — is that: Please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated COVID-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family, and your community. I urge you to visit Vaccines.gov to find a location where you can easily get an updated vaccine. And please do it as soon as possible.

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.

There's all of this concern about what's gain-of-function or what's not, with the implication that that research led to SARS-CoV-2, and COVID-19, which, George, unequivocally anybody that knows anything about viral biology and phylogeny of viruses know that it is molecularly impossible for those viruses that were worked on to turn into SARS-CoV-2 because they were distant enough molecularly that no matter what you did to them, they could never, ever become SARS-CoV-2

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.

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.

...record numbers of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, the sweetness is the light at the end of the tunnel, which I can tell you — as we get into January, February, March and April — that light is going to get brighter and brighter, and the bitterness is going to be replaced by the sweetness

I really feel strongly that we should get them vaccinated as soon as we possibly can. You want him fully protected as he enters into the presidency in January. So that would be my strong recommendation.

The answer is yes, a few, but one in particular. My youngest daughter’s boyfriend’s brother is a 32-year-old young man, athletic, healthy, who got COVID-19 and had one of the unusual complications of cardiomyopathy with an arrhythmia and died.

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

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.

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

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.

We have to admit it, that that mixed message in the beginning, even though it was well meant to allow masks to be available for health workers, that was detrimental in getting the message across. No doubt about it.

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.