Recently, Dr. Anthony Fauci finally admitted that the “pandemic phase” of COVID-19 was finally at an end, but even that statement from himself was not enough to convince the Chief Medical Advisor for the president that attending the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner will be safe enough.
Fauci took part in an interview on “PBS Newshour” with host Judy Woodruff. and stated to her that the United States was officially out of the OCVID-19 “pandemic phase.”
JUST IN: Dr. Anthony Fauci tells our @JudyWoodruff the U.S. is "out of the pandemic phase." https://t.co/x2wbLMyl6O pic.twitter.com/xA71jE4Fuv
— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) April 26, 2022
“Here we are, the end of April, the Spring of 2022. How close are we to the end of this pandemic?” questioned Woodruff.
“Well, that’s an unanswerable question for the following reason, and I don’t want to be evasive about it, but let me tell you why I’m giving you that answer,” started the doctor. “We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase, namely we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
“So, if you’re saying if we are out of the pandemic phase in this country? We are. What we hope to do, I don’t believe I’ve spoken about this widely, we’re not going to eradicate this virus,” Fauci went on, saying that keeping that level low will require even more vaccine booster shots over time.
“That might be every year, it might be longer in order to keep the level low. But right now we are not in the pandemic phase in this country,” he finished.
Despite these comments, however, it was reported by CNN that Fauci chose to not follow through with plans to attend the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which he was slated to be at under the banner of an ABC News guest.
“He recently decided to abandon those plans and inform ABC that he would no longer attend because of an individual assessment of his own personal risk,” claimed Oliver Darcy and Brian Stelter with CNN.