Dr. Tony Fauci joined me Monday morning:

Audio:

08-09hhs-fauci

Transcript:

HH: So pleased to welcome back Dr. Fauci. Good morning, Dr. Fauci. Welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show…Don’t hear you, Dr. Hello? Hello?

AF: I’m sorry, Hugh. Hugh…

HH: Oh, there you are.

AF: I’m sorry, Hugh. Well, thank you for having me, Hugh. It’s always a pleasure to be with you.

HH: It’s great to have you back. Now you know, we’re about 90% in agreement all the time, Dr. And I’ve been urging vaccines since they’ve been available, and mask and social distancing since January of last year. I’m kind of the CDC’s resident conservative cheerleader.

AF: Thanks, Hugh.

HH: But we have a disagreement that I want to air with you.

AF: Okay, let’s do that.

HH: My friend, Chuck Todd, disagrees with me, too. It’s about children K-3. And as the grandfather of three of them, and I talk to a lot of parents, they don’t believe masks are a good thing. They believe they are developmentally difficult to deal with. They can hide developmental disabilities. They impair speech and hearing, and that they’re not very effective. And boy, they feel this strongly, and it’s what the UK felt. My grandkids were in school in England last year. Why do you disagree with the UK specialists and with the Wall Street Journal this morning, article by Dr. Makary and Dr. Meissner?

AF: You know, Hugh, that is a difficult situation, because you really do have to balance the risk of transmission versus the real risk, and I’m not putting down what you’re saying. It’s not comfortable, obviously, for children to wear masks, particularly the younger children. But you know, what we’re starting to see, Hugh, and I think it’s going to unfold even more as the weeks go by, that this virus not only is so extraordinarily transmissible, but we’re starting to see pediatric hospitals get more and more younger people and kids not only numerically, but what seems to be more severe disease. Now we’re tracking that, the CDC is tracking that really very carefully, so it’s going to be a balance that we would feel very badly if we all of a sudden said okay, kids, don’t wear masks, then you find out retrospectively that this virus in a very, very strange and unusually way is really hitting kids really hard. That’s the thing. Nobody feels comfortable at all about having children be put in a situation where it might ultimately, the way some people study, have some impact on them. But hopefully, this will be a temporary thing, temporary enough that it doesn’t have any lasting negative impact on them. And getting back to what you and I both agree very much on, Hugh, is that the way to get out of all of this is to just get as many people vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can. If we could do that, the level of virus in the community would be so low that we wouldn’t be talking about things like masking indoors even for vaccinated people and masking in school.

HH: Now Dr., I want to stay focused on K-3 and 4 for a second, because that’s the only place where I find significant, I mean genuinely deep departure from CDC confidence among people who are center-right and center-left. We know the numbers for kids, 794 kids age 12 and younger die in vehicle crashes. 70 a year die from choking. 22 children and teens are shot every day. Dorothy Novick cited some of these numbers. She also cited that she’s at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, that the total number of children who have died from COVID as of July 29 was 358. That is, of course, a tragedy, every single one. But the doctors at work in the Wall Street Journal today say the transmission rate for children 5-17 was .5 per million, or roughly 25 patients. They say there is no conclusive evidence that children transmit the disease to each other, and they do say there’s conclusive evidence about children with myopia, children with learning disabilities, children learning, I want to read this, the possible psychological harm of widespread masking is an even greater worry. Facial expression are integral to human connection, particularly for younger children who are only learning how to signal fear, confusion and happiness. Covering a child’s faces mutes these nonverbal form of communications, can result in robotic and emotionless interaction. So Dr., what did you base it on? Why?

AF: Yeah.

HH: CDC came out and said K-3, and I’m only focused on K-3.

AF: Right, right.

HH: What, why did you do it?

AF: Yeah, so first of all, a lot of the data that you’re talking about, about transmission among kids, dates back to the alpha variant, not necessarily all the most recent data on delta. Delta is different. So Hugh, I promise you something, because I respect you. And I think everything in that article that just came out from Makary and Meissner, I think, should be taken seriously. But we’d better go back and make sure those data are really solid the same way you’re asking me, and I will. I’ll go back to the CDC and make sure that the data that they’re talking about is really solid. So let’s do both. Let’s just check both those things out and make sure we’re really talking about apples and apples and not apples and oranges, and make sure we’re talking about transmissibility of Delta as we’re seeing what it’s doing right now.

HH: I agree. Look…

AF: So I’ll just keep an open mind.

HH: I do.

AF: I’ll keep an open mind about that.

HH: I have an open mind, but what they say today, and you’ve read it, obviously, is that there is no data…

AF: Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah.

HH: Yeah, so let me go to my second great danger – public education generally. After a year of lockdowns and now mask controversies, and they cannot be dismissed as right-wing nuts, it’s left, right, center. It’s parents. Public education is taking it on the chin, Doc.

AF: Yeah.

HH: They are really losing support. Teachers unions are viewed as villains, school districts are divided with parents screaming at each other. This is horrific for public education, which you know, all three of my kids went through 12 years of public education. I know about you and I were parochial school kids, but this is not good for public education because of division over COVID.

AF: Right. You’re absolutely right, and that’s the reason why again, the solution, Hugh, it’s not easy. It’s not easy. The solution is, first of all, we all agree. We’ve got to get the children back to school, in school, full time. Some schools have already started. My own daughter is an elementary school teacher, and she is in the middle of it all in New Orleans. So I know full well from my own family the difficulty that they find when you need to get the children into school and keep them there. The solution, for goodness sakes, is let’s get all of these people who are the 93 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated, let’s get them vaccinated. That’s where we should be focusing our attention. If we do that, Hugh, this will all go away. The kids will be in school without masks if we do that.

HH: Well, I agree. I want it mandated. Let me, for teachers. I want to go to the third danger out there, Dr., which is to the idea of non-partisan public health. I am very concerned not about this crisis, but about the next one. And the belief that is growing that the CDC and the FDA and everybody else is somehow being politicized. You know, I never believed that. I never ever believe that, and now, I hear it all the time. And you know how you get banged up by conservatives. Not me, but I know a lot of conservatives bang on you, and I know you don’t care. You take it. You’re a pro. But do you think the general idea that science can be trusted by…

AF: Yeah.

HH: You know what I’m talking about, is we’re hemorrhaging credibility from the people that we used to reflexively listen to.

AF: Yeah, yeah, and we’ve got to continue to make sure that all of us on both sides, and when I say both sides, I mean the people who look at it from the outside as well as the inside public health community, have to be very sensitive to that. But I can tell you, Hugh, having been in seven administrations, to see all of the things that go back and forth, this is not being political. I mean, I am not in the CDC. You know that. I’m at NIH.

HH: Right. Right.

AF: And I, and you know, we make the vaccines. We test the vaccines. But I’m in on the discussions. And I can tell you it really is not politicized. They’re doing their best. They’re not always correct. We know that. They tend to correct when they do find that they’re going down the wrong path. But I don’t see political influence at all in that. I don’t, Hugh. I really don’t.

HH: Well, let me put it this way. I see you with my friend, Chuck, like quarterly, maybe even monthly, and that’s great. I want you everywhere. But our conservative influences like, you know, Newt Gingrich, Brit Hume, Justice Thomas, Archbishop Chaput, Secretary Condi Rice or Mike Pompeo, are they enlisted in the public campaign for vaccinations? Do you think that the public health authorities are making an effort to make this a non-partisan…I had the guy on from the White House early on in the Biden years just to make sure that this was not partisan, but it’s slipped into partisanship.

AF: It is. Hugh, I mean, you know how much as a public health person the only thing I care about, and you’ve known me for so many years, from the Reagan administration you know me…

HH: Yup.

AF: …is that we, that the only thing we care about is the health and the safety of the American public. So why is it, what can we do to get those 93 million people who are eligible to be vaccinated to understand, put all of this, you know, this ideological stuff behind and say let’s end this epidemic and try to rebuild trust among each other, because if we don’t, we’re not even going to function well as a country. I mean, the thing that bothers me as much about the public health aspect is the divisiveness in the country for any challenge, including the next public health challenge. So I feel very, very concerned about that.

HH: That is in fact my question, danger number four. But I hope when you go talk to your team today, you say let’s get Stanley McChrystal, let’s get Dennis Prager, let’s talk to Charles Chaput, let’s get Condi, just open it up, because all right now, it’s left-right. It’s a disaster. Now my real concern, and I wrote about this in the Washington Post. When I read about the 1918 influenza, it mutated repeatedly over the summer, and it got deadlier in its first iteration of mutations. I don’t know if the Delta variant is the last. Is there a potential omega variant out there that becomes deadlier still, Dr.?

AF: Hugh, it is potentially the situation that that could occur, and that’s, I know you probably heard what I said on the Sunday shows yesterday, is that viruses will not mutate unless you allow them to replicate. And that’s the reason why when you have a degree of viral dynamics that smolders, when you have certain proportions of the population that don’t get vaccinated, they leave it wide open for the virus to continue to replicate. You know, not every mutation has a functional consequence. So that’s the good thing. If you keep allowing it to mutate by letting the virus spread in the community of the unvaccinated, there is a reasonable chance that sooner or later, there’ll be a constellation of mutations that lead to a variant. We’re lucky that even though the Delta variant is a very formidable variant, that our vaccines do very well not only against protecting against infection even though there will always be breakthrough. We know that, because no vaccine is 100% protective. But the good news is that this vaccine constellation that we have, the vaccines that we’re giving to the American public, do very well against severe disease and hospitalization and deaths. But that’s because we’re lucky we’ve got a good vaccine. If you get a variant that eludes the protection of the vaccines that we have, we could be in greater trouble, which is yet again another reason for everybody to put differences aside and say let’s crush this thing now and then try to rebuild trust among each other.

HH: Well, that’s what brings me to the third world. The Delta is rampaging in Indonesia, Malaysia, and India. We don’t even really have numbers out of South America. Even if the United States gets to 95% vaccination, we’re still going to have international travelers.

AF: Right.

HH: What do you, Tony Fauci, worry about the most, a mutation that occurs abroad that can evade our vaccines, or do you have, what’s your level of confidence in our adaptability of the vaccine technology that we have in the vaccines that we’ve got to meet any future variant of this virus?

AF: Well, I think we can do it, and that’s the reason why, you know, if you listen to many of the things I say, this is a global pandemic that requires a global response. And take a look at what the Biden administration is doing. Already, half a billion doses are going out. We’ve given out 110 million doses to 60 countries. We’re doing better than all the other countries combined. But you know what, Hugh? We’ve got to do better than that, and that’s what I’m pushing for. I’m pushing to increase dramatically the capacity to make enough doses to get the world vaccinated. The USA is not going to be able to do that alone, and that’s for sure. But we’ve got to be leaders the same way we were with the PEPFAR program in HIV in Southern Africa and other low and middle income regions of the world. If we do that in other countries, the European Union and other of the richer countries chip in, we can globally suppress this. And then once we do that, we don’t have to worry about variants from anywhere.

HH: Okay, my last question, Dr., and you’ve been generous with your time, and I hope you keep coming back, has to do with the Provincetown study. And this is just a specific journalist’s question. When I was in college in Boston in the 70s, Provincetown was a wild place, and it’s still a wild place. And everybody knows on the 4th of July weekend, it’s the wildest of wild places. Wouldn’t that by definition be an outlier study on transmissibility given the number of people, the partying that goes on, the age range? I mean, what applicability at all does that have for, say elementary school kids?

AF: No, actually, you make a point about some people saying that it’s an outlier, but the reason I’m almost certain it’s not an outlier, Hugh, is we had the same thing happen in San Francisco at the San Francisco general hospital and related hospitals in San Francisco where you had 200 members of the staff who are vaccinated who wound up getting infected. They got low level disease, they were either asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic, but it proved on the diametrically opposite side of the country in a place that you wouldn’t consider a wild place, I don’t think San Francisco General is a wild place.

HH: No, no.

AF: But they showed an incredible amount of transmissibility. Do I don’t, I mean, I mean obviously, Provincetown is a place of great festivity during the summer, but I don’t think it is that much of an outlier.

HH: Okay, so the question becomes did the CDC guidance on schools change because of the Provincetown study?

AF: The CDC guidelines, when you look at what has evolved over the past several weeks to a month, and the realization that the level of virus in the nasopharynx of people who are infected but vaccinated, breakthrough infection, is quite different than what we’ve seen with Alpha. It’s relatively equivalent, at least initially, to the level of virus in people who are unvaccinated. That being the case, the somewhat confidence that we had that if you were vaccinated and you had a breakthrough infection, is was very unlikely that you were going to transmit it to someone else. But when you look at the fact that you have a high level of virus even in a vaccinated person, despite the fact that you have to admit, it does diminish more rapidly than in an unvaccinated person, that theoretically gives you the basis to say that those people can actually spread infection. And that’s the concern, and that was the fundamental scientific basis for the CDC’s decision to modify the mask wearing mandate. They didn’t mandate. They recommended.

HH: Yeah, my comment on that is that sadly, I think the CDC is vaccinating the public against listening to them, because it’s just so poorly explained. And Dr. Walensky is trying. I attribute to everyone good faith, but I don’t see them on places like this show or on Dennis Prager’s show. I don’t see them on Joe Rogan’s show. I don’t see them on Fox. Do they need to get out more and try and persuade, as you do, Dr., through long conversations with the center-right?

AF: You know, I’m always willing to do that. You know that, Hugh.

HH: Yes.

AF: And I think the CDC is also as long as when they’re approached in good faith and not in an accusatory way. And sometimes, that happens. You know, you and I have conversations. I enjoy it. We don’t always agree, but it’s both in good faith. And that’s why I will always go on your show anytime you want me to.

HH: Well, I appreciate that, and I look forward to hearing more on the K-3, because I think that is the biggest divide among people who have previously been all on the same team, but you’ve lost, I think, not you, but I think the CDC has lost a lot of parents, because they think their kids are at risk from masks.

AF: Right.

HH: And good luck on that, because the more you talk about it directly, the better off we are. Dr. Tony Fauci, always a pleasure. Thank you, Dr.,

AF: Thanks a lot, Hugh. Thank you for having me.

End of interview.