The controversial White House chief medical advisor maintains that it is impossible to know whether the COVID restrictions such as lockdowns were beneficial to stop the spread of the disease, despite studies proving otherwise.
Dr. Anthony Fauci this week said that the U.S. may never come close to finding out if the COVID lockdowns were ever really "worth it." These lockdowns were opposed by many workers who were forced out of their jobs and those whose children were required to learn from home, placing the burden on already busy parents.
"You know, I don't think we're ever going to be able to determine what the right balance is," Dr. Fauci remarked during BBC's "Sunday Morning," when asked if lockdowns were "worth it" or "too severe," Fox News reported.
But Dr. Fauci maintains that it did help curb COVID hospitalizations, arguing, "I think the restrictions - if you want to use that word, which I tend to shy away from, lockdown - they certainly prevented a lot of infections, prevented a lot of hospitalizations, and prevented a lot of deaths. There's no doubt about that."
The White House chief medical advisor admitted that COVID lockdowns were not without "unintended negative consequences," specifically when it comes to students who were unable to attend school. Dr. Fauci's statements earned criticism on Twitter, where users commented on how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) finally admitted that the COVID lockdowns had consequences.
"Progress! First time I've heard Dr. Fauci admit there are lockdown harms at all," Stanford University Professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya wrote on Twitter. "Even the blind shall see. Eventually."
Dr. Fauci's comments arrived after several studies conducted during and after the coronavirus pandemic suggested that COVID lockdowns did not stop the spread of the virus and in some cases have sparked more consequences than benefits.
A Johns Hopkins University study from earlier this year revealed that COVID lockdowns during the first coronavirus wave in the Spring of 2020 only reduced COVID mortality by 0.2% in the U.S. and Europe. Researchers wrote, "While this meta-analysis concludes that lockdowns have had little to no public health effects, they have imposed enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument."
But Dr. Fauci insists that in the event of another COVID variant spreading that causes "an uptick in cases and hospitalization," Americans must be "prepared and flexible enough to pivot toward going back - at least temporarily - to a more rigid type of restrictions, such as requiring masks indoors," the Gateway Pundit reported.
Meanwhile, the 81 year old also confirmed that he had already received his second booster shot or fourth dose of the COVID vaccine, ABC News reported. This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to the second booster doses of Pfizer and Moderna's COVID vaccines for those aged 50 and above.
The highly transmissible Omicron's subvariant BA.2 strain, which has become dominant, sparked concerns about another wave of new cases such as that observed in Europe and China, Bloomberg reported. But the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) did not discuss with an independent panel of advisers with regards to the most recent approval, a move criticized by many vaccine skeptics.
