Dr. Anthony Fauci has acknowledged that mistakes were made in the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, stating that “something clearly went wrong.” However, he rejected responsibility for some of the most consequential results of his anti-infection recommendations. Fauci maintained that he did not order the closure of schools and factories, saying, “I never did.” Instead, he argued that he merely echoed the recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and that people made decisions based on those recommendations.

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did,” Fauci told The NYT Magazine when questioned about the “heavy-handed” policies he suggested throughout the pandemic.

In the New York Times Magazine interview, Fauci adopted a defensive posture, accusing the interviewer of “Monday-morning quarterbacking” when asked about the high number of COVID-19 deaths among vaccinated people. While acknowledging that the U.S. could have handled the pandemic better, Fauci defended the actions of the CDC and other government leaders, saying they did the best they could given the challenge of fighting a novel virus.

Fauci stated that national divisiveness and the culture wars have made it difficult to implement effective public health measures. He admitted that he did not know the answer to the question of whether masking was effective in curbing the spread of the virus but emphasized that he saw the pandemic as an epidemiological phenomenon rather than an economic or political issue. Ultimately, he argued that he saw the impact of the pandemic on a personal level, as someone who had witnessed people dying from the virus.

“I think anything that instigated or intensified the culture wars just made things worse. And I have to be honest with you, when it comes to masking, I don’t know. But I do know that the culture wars have been really, really tough from a public-health standpoint,” Fauci said.

“Ultimately an epidemiologist sees it as an epidemiological phenomenon. An economist sees it from an economic standpoint. And I see it from somebody in bed dying.”

“Something clearly went wrong. And I don’t know exactly what it was. But the reason we know it went wrong is that we are the richest country in the world, and on a per-capita basis we’ve done worse than virtually all other countries. And there’s no reason that a rich country like ours has to have 1.1 million deaths. Unacceptable,” he said.

“When people say to me, ‘Could we have done better?’ Of course, of course. If you knew many of the things then that now you know, definitely you would want to do things differently,” Fauci said.

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