Happy New Year! Cliches can set in fast, but the declaration that everyone is glad to be done with 2020 is one with which I wholeheartedly agree. It’s hard to imagine 2021 being worse, so let’s toast the law of averages that eventually things must improve.
To that end, my final interview of the year on my show, The Bottom Line, produced by Al Jazeera English and on networks around the world, was with Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a generations-long warrior against some of the worst infectious diseases that have threatened mankind.
Dr. Fauci says he sees a light at the end of the tunnel for COVID-19 but that it’s bittersweet given that a couple hundred thousand people in the US today are getting infected, a couple thousand a day are dying, and more that 121,000 people are currently hospitalized from COVID-19 complications at the time of publication. But Fauci offers a number of other candid observations ranging from vaccinating children to taking the newly developed MRNA platforms and going back to attack other viruses from year’s past that we still struggle with. We discuss much in this interview, but we went a number of directions many discussions have not — particularly his view on the state of science in America today, and the battle against those who believe science is their enemy.
— Steve Clemons
