Fauci dismisses critics, defends Biden's pandemic is 'over' comment on 'Late Show'
Stephen Colbert frets that pandemic doesn't feel 'over' since his audience has to wear masks
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Dr. Anthony Fauci dismissed his critics and defended President Biden during a sit-down interview Wednesday night with comedian Stephen Colbert.
On CBS’ "The Late Show," Fauci was questioned about what it was like to become the center of a media and political "firestorm" for offering the American public "cogent advice" about the COVID-19 pandemic.
"How do you weather that kind of maelstrom?" Colbert asked.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Fauci said the solution was just to focus on what the job at hand is, and to tackle problems from the perspective of a scientist and physician, whether it be developing a vaccine or messaging about masking and inoculation.
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"What you need to do is just focus like a laser on what your job is, and my job is to do whatever I can to protect the health and the welfare of the American public and indirectly for the rest of the world—because we’re a leader in public health," Fauci said. "And all that other stuff is noise. I mean the slings and the arrows and all that kind of thing. You just got to put that aside as noise and not pay attention to it."
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}Colbert also asked Fauci about Biden’s declaration that the pandemic is "over," a statement later walked back by the White House.
"It doesn’t feel over," Colbert said, before asking to switch to a shot of the audience all wearing masks. "This audience right here, everybody here is still in their masks right here, just for an abundance of safety. So as you can see every night I come out here, and it doesn’t feel over to me. When will it feel over?"
Fauci replied that it will feel over in a "real sense" when COVID gets to a low enough level of transmission and death that it ceases to disrupt the "social order," such as people needing to wear masks. He also claimed that the president was referring to the idea that the "acute" stage of the pandemic was over, and that deaths and hospitalizations were way down.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}FAUCI WISHES HE HAD BEEN 'MORE CAREFUL' IN COVID MESSAGING, BLAMES 'SOUND BITES'
"But the level that we’re at, Stephen, is not really acceptable," Fauci added. "I don’t feel comfortable at all with saying we can live with 400 deaths a day. We have got to get the level of infection and the level of deaths and hospitalizations far, far lower so that it is not eradicated—we’re not going to completely get rid of this. But we want to get it to a level that is so low it just doesn’t disrupt society."
Prior to the show, Colbert and Fauci took a stroll through New York City, stopping at a grocery store, and then a Walgreens where Fauci received his COVID-19 booster shot on camera.
{{#rendered}} {{/rendered}}At the pharmacy, Colbert asked the physician if he was nervous to give Fauci a shot, to which the man told Colbert that he had given vaccines "plenty of times," and that the infectious disease expert was only the third most famous person he had vaccinated.
Colbert then made several jokes about vaccine side effects and Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend, who had previously claimed his testicles became swollen following vaccination. The show ended with the late-night host telling viewers to head to the government’s vaccine website if they want to stay as healthy as Fauci.