5 takeaways:
➀ Monkeypox: ‘We Have a Problem Here.’ The World Health Organization recently announced that the global monkeypox outbreak does not constitute a public health emergency, but Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a June 28 briefing exclusively for National Press Foundation fellows that his attention to an outbreak isn’t based on semantics. “We have a problem here,” Fauci said. “We’re facing an outbreak, a global outbreak in non-endemic countries. We don’t have a handle on whether there’s subclinical spread that we’re missing because there’s not enough testing going on.” (Transcript | Video)
➁ We’re ‘swimming in the dark’ on long COVID. There is currently no treatment for long COVID, and the diagnosis for long COVID is still “very iffy,” Fauci said. “We need to learn more about and get a stricter definition of what long COVID is.” The RECOVER initiative at the NIH is currently looking at COVID survivors to determine the long-term effects of COVID. “We’re collecting large cohorts of people to try and find some both clinical and laboratory common denominators and then pursue a pathogenic mechanism. And once you get a pathogenic mechanism, then you could start thinking about treatment.”
➂ Fauci is‘ very concerned’ about COVID funding. While COVID funding is currently stalled in Congress, Fauci and his colleagues on the coronavirus team from the White House are “very concerned about the lack of responsiveness to our needs,” he said. The Biden administration requested $22.5 billion to pay for next-generation vaccines, testing, and research efforts, among other pandemic countermeasures. Up to now, Fauci said that Congress has been extremely generous, but “we are still in the middle of a war here against a very formidable virus.”
➃ We’re living in the ‘normalization of untruths.’ Even after 50 years at the NIH, dealing with the early years of HIV, Ebola and Zika, Fauci said he’s “never seen anything of the magnitude of the deliberate misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that we’re seeing with COVID.” The best way to counter misinformation and disinformation is to flood the system with correct information. Fauci called the environment we’re living in the “normalization of untruths,” with the danger being that “society tends to shrug their shoulders” and distrust even correct information for lack of being able to discern the truth.
➄ Public image: the good, the bad and the ugly. For the past two years, Republicans have used Fauci as a villain in campaign ads. But Fauci said that although he’s been “public enemy number one” to one portion of the population, he’s also been a symbol of truth to the other. “I feel a very deep responsibility to the American public. I’m a public [servant], I’m a physician, I’m a scientist, and I’m a public health official.” A study showed 1,500 incidents of harassment of U.S. public health officials during the first 11 months of the pandemic – and that’s just the incidents that were reported.
NPF is solely responsible for the content.
