Anthony Fauci may have resigned as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but he’s still very much in the public eye. He readily gives interviews, was the subject of a recent PBS documentary, and has agreed to requests by House Republicans to testify on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a new interview with the New York Times Magazine, Fauci responded to a wide range of questions about the pandemic and his career, which saw him serve as a key advisor to seven U.S. presidents.
At one point in the questioning, the interviewer, David Wallace-Wells, asked Fauci how effectively the age skew of COVID was conveyed to the public.
As Wallace-Wells wrote three years ago for New York magazine: “As we’ve known nearly from the start of this pandemic, but have chosen to downplay in our public messaging and public policy, COVID-19 is brutally lethal for the elderly, considerably less so for the middle-aged, and still less so for the young. The disease discriminates by age.”
In his interview, Wallace-Wells took the opportunity to ask Fauci about that directly.
“Did we do enough to communicate the age skew of the disease?” he asked. “I still think, honestly to this day, that almost no one appreciates just how wide that age skew really is, given that the risk to someone in their eighties or nineties is perhaps hundreds of times as high as it is to someone in their twenties or thirties.”
“You are hitting on some terrific points,” Fauci replied. “Did we say that the elderly were much more vulnerable? Yes. Did we say it over and over and over again? Yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn’t get that feeling that the vulnerable are really, really heavily weighted toward the elderly. Like 85% of the hospitalizations are there. But if you ask the person in the street, they may say, ‘Oh, yeah, elderly are more vulnerable, but everybody’s really vulnerable’—which is true, but to a much lesser extent.”
The trend of older Americans being hit harder by COVID had become even more pronounced by late last year (Biden declared the pandemic over in September). The Washington Post reported last November that, based on its analysis of CDC data, nearly nine in 10 COVID deaths were in people 65 or older—the highest rate ever.
