Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that it is time to "move forward" from the COVID-19 pandemic, as long as coronavirus vaccines and treatments remain accessible.
When asked about the impending end of the public health emergency, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director told "CNN This Morning" that while there is debate about its conclusion, he believes it is "important to move forward" under those conditions.
"But, I think, in general, we really need to move forward so long as we don't leave a big gap in being able to take care of the people who may not have available to them now the things that were very, very important to them at the time that we had all of the issues that were related to the emergency. We want to be able to have some sort of a safety net for them to be able to get drugs and be able to get vaccines, so those things don't fall between the cracks," Fauci explained.
"I mean, everybody wants this outbreak behind us. We want to make sure we don’t forget about it completely because we still have about 150 deaths per day and there’s still a lot of virus out there. So, we can’t just completely forget about it; we gotta continue to pay attention to it," he added.
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The national public health emergency is set to end on May 11.
The former chief medical adviser to President Biden also responded to a report that said the U.S. government had been ill-prepared in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The more than 350-page report from the COVID Crisis Group cited outdated health systems and "bad governance."
"We thought we were the best-prepared country. In some respects, from a scientific standpoint, as manifested by the really overwhelming success of the rapid development of the vaccine, then we did very well. But when it came to the implementation of public health, the uniformity of a response, the communication, the ability to get data in real time, we really fell very short," Fauci noted.
"So, hopefully the lessons learned from that type of a really strict analysis of what went wrong will help prepare us for future pandemics," he continued. "But, no doubt about it, there were a lot of things that we didn’t do as well as we could and we've got to do better not only in the continued response to the current outbreak but in preparation for the inevitability of future outbreaks."
