After Dr. Anthony Fauci announced Monday he plans to retire from government service at the end of 2022, video resurfaced of him saying that one of the biggest mistakes the government made during the pandemic was not locking down sooner like China.
Fauci said Monday he would step down from his roles as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden in December after 38 years of working for the government. He said he plans to focus on the “next chapter” of his career.
One of Dr. Fauci’s biggest regrets was that America did not lock down society as strictly as countries like China did during the coronavirus pandemic. pic.twitter.com/YCVg2bcrX5
— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) August 22, 2022
Breitbart White House correspondent Charlie Spiering resurfaced an old video clip of Fauci suggesting that a major regret for him in America’s COVID-19 response was that the country wasn’t shut down sooner, like how the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shut down China.
“When it became clear that we had community spread in the country… I recommended to the president that we shut the country down. And that was a very difficult decision,” Fauci said. “But there was no way to stop the explosive spread that we knew would occur if we didn’t do that.”
“And unfortunately, since we actually did not shut down completely, the way China did, the way Korea did, the way Taiwan did, we actually did see [a] spread even though we shut down,” he continued.
Fauci made the comments at a Q&A session at the College of the Holy Cross in October 2020.
The CCP imposed highly draconian measures to stop the spread of COVID-19 during various phases of the pandemic, such as forcibly quarantining people inside their residences, censoring information from journalists about the pandemic, tracking citizens via smartphone apps and reportedly separating infected children from their families. (RELATED: How Lockdowns Brought China’s Second Largest City To The Brink Of Anarchy)
Countries like South Korea and Taiwan also implemented far stricter lockdown measures than the United States. Fauci has repeatedly argued that the United States could have prevented more coronavirus deaths by implementing restrictions earlier than authorities did.