When there are many unknowns, there is a lot of fear and concern in the community, that's exactly what we are seeing now with Zika.

Anthony Fauci

Categorized in : World

I'm Anthony Fauci, a physician and a public health official. I give advice, according to the best scientific evidence, i don't give advice about economic things.

Even at the top speed we're going, we don't see a vaccine playing in the ability of individuals getting back to school this term, what they really want is to know if they are safe.

There is certainly not a confrontational relationship between me and the President, as I've mentioned many times, I give advice and opinion based (on) evidence-based scientific information. He hears that. He respects it. He gets opinions from a variety of other people. But in no way, in my experience over the last several months, has there been any confrontational relationship between us.

This is, this is such an important problem, it transcends all of us individually, and we have to be working as a team. And I enjoy very much working with your senators and the governors, because it's at the local level that we're going to make it work. So I am fine. I appreciate your concern.

But you ignored the fact that they accomplished theirs at the beginning of the outbreak, while we treaded water during February and March.

I am very careful, and hopefully humble, in knowing that I don't know everything about this disease, and that's why I am very careful in making broad predictions.

There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control and ... could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery.

If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to :' Open America Again,' then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country, this will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.

You got a problem there, you know why ? Because it is likely that if four of them are positive and they've been hanging around together, that the other ones that are negative are really positive. So, I mean, if you have one outlier( only one player testing positive), I think you might get away. But once you wind up having a situation where it looks like it's spread within a team, you got a real problem. You got ta shut it down.

You cant just leap over things and get into a situation where youre really tempting a rebound.

If you look at the evolution of the virus in bats and what's out there now,( the scientific evidence) is very, very strongly leaning toward this could not have been artificially or deliberately manipulated.

It may all of a sudden have a safety signal, if it doesn't work, it doesn't protect people. I've been involved in vaccine work for decades. Not every vaccine we went after worked.

It's the balance of something that's a very difficult choice.

One interesting feature of this novel coronavirus pandemic is that very few children have become sick with COVID-19 compared to adults.

If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well, if we don't do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter.

When it does, how we handle it, will determine our fate.

There are some states, some cities... kind of leapfrogging over the first checkpoint. And, I mean, obviously you could get away with that, but you are making a really significant risk, i hope they can actually handle any rebound that they see.

You don't have to wait five or six months to scale up to get enough doses, to give to a meaningful number of people, that's a risky financial circumstance, but it certainly, certainly is worth the risk given what's at stake.

If we get in there and there are a number of infections, you can get an efficacy signal right away, which means you may know right ahead of time whether or not you have something that works.

The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut, significant, positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery.