We argued strongly with the President that he not withdraw those guidelines after 15 days but that he extend them, and he did listen, dr. Debbie Birx and I went into together in the Oval Office and leaned over the desk and said, here are the data, take a look. He looked at them, he understood them, and he just shook his head and said, 'I guess we've got to do it.'.

Anthony Fauci

I don't see any option other than to start re-implementing significant levels of social distancing.

One of the problems we face in United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority, so when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to White House, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth.

What happens is that in the standard way of developing a vaccine, you don't jump to invest in the next step until you're pretty sure that the step you're in is working, given the fact that we needed to do this as quickly as possible without sacrificing safety or scientific integrity, the federal government partnered with multiple of these companies and said,' Guess what, we're going to move fast and we're going to assume we're going to be successful. And if we are, we've saved several months. And if we're not, the only thing we've lost is money. But better lose money than lose lives by delaying the vaccine.' So, right now, the initial data from the study showed that. It makes me cautiously optimistic that we can induce a response that would be protective.

And then when they do get infected, given the social determinants of health which make it for them, have a higher incidence of diseases like hypertension, obesity, diabetes, they are at much greater risk of suffering the deleterious consequences including death.

But if you look at the data, now that papers have come out literally two days ago, the fact that we shut down when we did and the rest of the world did, has saved hundreds of millions of infections and millions of lives, and yet, there are those who say,' You shut down, you did destructive things by disrupting the economy.' And others say,' Well, if you save so many infections by shutting down, why didn't you shut down two weeks earlier ? You could have saved many more lives.'.

Sixty-two days later, we had a product that we put into clinical trial, in a Phase I to see if it's safe and does it induce an immune response. That is overwhelmingly the quickest that has ever been done.

When you give advice about what should you be doing -- should you be out there, should you be shutting down earlier versus later ? I mean, people get confused. And they say,' Wow, you know, we shut down and we caused a great disruption in society. We caused great economic pain, loss of jobs,'.

Even in warm weather, like in Arizona and California, we're starting to see resurgences as we open up( after shelter-at-home periods), but I think the chances of there being less of an issue in the end of July and all of August and September are much, much better than if you go into October.

I have not spoken to Larry Kudlow. I was not one of the people Larry Kudlow spoke to.

When you're in a large crowd, if you have the congregation of people that are much, much closer to each other, you definitely increase the risk that you will either acquire or spread infections.

But when you start seeing more hospitalizations, that's a sure fire sign that you're in a situation where you're going in the wrong direction.

However, when you start to see increases in hospitalization, National Institute of Allergy's National Institute of Allergy that you've got to pay close attention to.

By the end of the year, we will have a trial that has accrued a large number of people and we hopefully will get an answer, whether it works or not.

But the preliminary data that we've seen... still indicates to me, a degree that I can have a certain amount of cautious optimism -- namely, it's inducing a response in individuals to a level that would predict that there's a good chance that it might protect.

When you get congregations like we saw with the demonstrations, that's taking a risk.

And we know from epidemiological studies they can transmit to someone who is uninfected even when they're without symptoms, so to make a statement to say National Institute of Allergy's National Institute of Allergy was not correct.

The coronavirus vaccine effort is progressing very well and we expect more than one candidate vaccine to be in advanced clinical testing by early summer, this is good news for the overall coronavirus vaccine effort.

By the beginning of 2021, we hope to have a couple of hundred million doses.

We're going to start manufacturing doses of the vaccines way before we even know that the vaccine works.

I hesitate to make any broad statements about whether it is or is not quote 'safe' for kids to come back to school, when you talk about children going back to school and their safety, it really depends on the level of viral activity and the particular area that you're talking about. What happens all too often -- understandably, but sometimes misleadingly -- is that we talk about the country as a whole in a unidimensional away.