Dr. Anthony Fauci still insists it’s too early to say the pandemic is waning due to the contagious but mild Omicron variant.
Speaking online at the World Economic Forum, Fauci was asked if the virus that causes COVID-19 would finally become endemic in 2022. He responded by saying it’s too early to tell and that the world still appears to be in phase one of a five-phase pandemic, The New York Times reported.
“Dr. Fauci also said that the world is still in the first of what he considered to be the five phases of the pandemic. The first is the ‘truly pandemic’ phase, ‘where the whole world is really very negatively impacted,’ followed by deceleration, control, elimination and eradication,” The Times reported.
Fauci added that the only infectious human disease to ever be eradicated was smallpox but said, “That’s not going to happen with this virus.”
Further, Fauci insisted that countries needed to reach phase two, or the “control” phase, to make the virus a “non-disruptive presence” in society. When this happens, he said, the virus could be considered endemic, likening it to the rhinovirus and certain other upper respiratory infections.
Fauci also said during the event that since the Omicron variant is more contagious but causes less severe symptoms, it could help spread collective immunity, but insisted “it is an open question as to whether or not Omicron is going to be the live virus vaccination that everyone is hoping for, because you have such a great deal of variability with new variants emerging.”
“I would hope that that’s the case,” Fauci added, “but that would only be the case if we don’t get another variant that eludes the immune response.”
Fauci cautioned that the future of the pandemic is still unknown, saying, “The answer is: We do not know.”
Fauci has become a polarizing figure during the pandemic, from regularly changing his stance on various aspects of the pandemic such as masks and isolation times, to consistently insisting we are hardly better off than we were in March 2020.
As The Daily Wire reported, the frustrations with Fauci could come to a head if Republicans win back the House in 2022. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that he would investigate Fauci should Republicans retake the lower chamber.
“If the American people put us back in charge, we are definitely going to do this because we now know without a doubt that Dr. Fauci knew on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 that this thing came from a lab,” Jordan said. “The top scientists in the country were saying it came from a lab. One scientist says we got the notes now from the conference call on February 1st. One scientist says, ‘I don’t see how this can happen in nature, but it would be easy to do in a lab.’”
“And yet just in a matter of days, they changed their position, write the article that appears in Nature of Medicine Magazine, which then gets cited in the now famous letter in The Lancet, which became the gospel for the fact that Fauci can go out and tell people it didn’t come from a lab when in fact they knew it did,” Jordan continued. “The interesting thing is. We point this out. We just learned this last week, the two doctors who were most adamant that this thing came from a lab early on: one is Dr. Kristian Anderson. On Jan. 31, 2020, he says this to Dr. Fauci in an email: ‘Virus looks engineered. Virus not consistent with evolutionary theory.’ So, he knew it came from a lab.”