A senior adviser who worked with both U.S. administrations during the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, admitted it was a mistake to close schools for a year due to the virus.
“Keep [le confinement dans les écoles] for a year was not a good idea,” Dr. Fauci said on the show CBS Mornings Tuesday morning.
The doctor nevertheless insisted that the initial closure of schools was a good solution to prevent the spread of the virus, according to extracts reported by the New York Post.
“When we had to close everything for 15 days to flatten the curve [de transmission]we were in a tsunami of cases,” he recalled in an interview.
“The problem is: closing everything immediately – and we haven’t closed everything – but basically establishing social distancing, and also [fermer] schools, was the right thing to do, but the length of time we maintained these measures was the problem,” said Dr. Fauci.
“If you go back to YouTube, I kept saying, ‘Close the bars, open the schools,’” he said. “Open schools as quickly and safely as possible.”
The man who was for 38 years one of the most renowned experts on infectious diseases in the public service in the United States gave an interview on the American channel following the publication of his memoir: On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service (On call: the journey of a doctor in the public service).
He testifies in the lines of his novel of the strong emotional moments which animated the years of the pandemic and, among others, the one when the specialists informed him that a vaccine had been created to limit the effects of COVID-19 . A discovery that the doctor could not have expected.
“It’s historic what was accomplished,” he told the host on CBS. In 11 months? If we were 10-15 years earlier, this process would have taken years and years.”
“It was an incredible scientific achievement,” he said.
