Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
'Two Kinds Of America': Fauci Urges Leaders To Reach Out To Unvaccinated
CNN: Fauci: 'We're Going In The Wrong Direction' On Covid-19 Cases
Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that the US is "going in the wrong direction" as the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise, particularly among unvaccinated Americans. "If you look at the inflection of the curve of new cases and, as you said in the run-in to this interview, that it is among the unvaccinated. And since we have 50% of the country is not fully vaccinated, that's a problem," Fauci told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union" when asked about a model projecting a worst case scenario of 4,000 deaths a day in the US from Covid-19, if vaccination rates do not improve. (Duster, 7/25)
Politico: Leaders In Under-Vaccinated Areas Should 'Speak Out' Amid Virus Surge, Fauci Says
Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious disease expert, on Sunday said more leaders in areas that are lagging in vaccination against the coronavirus should "speak out" to persuade people to get inoculated as the Delta variant surges. Fauci's comments, made in an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," came after Alabama's Republican governor, Kay Ivey, publicly blamed unvaccinated people for the disease's spread. (O'Brien, 7/25)
Fox News: Fauci Says Virus Has 'Peaked' For The Vaccinated: 'We Have Two Kinds Of America'
Dr. Anthony Fauci said there seem to be "two kinds of America" as some people remain skeptical of COVID-19 vaccines even in the face of the more severe delta variant. The delta variant has ripped through the unvaccinated population in America, with Centers for Disease Control Director Rochelle Walensky claiming the variant is "spreading with incredible efficiency and now represents more than 83% of the virus circulating the United States." (Aitken, 7/25)
In news about covid's origin —
Roll Call: Experts Weigh In On Risky Wuhan Study That Fauci, Paul Debated
Several experts say Anthony Fauci was correct this week when he described an experiment funded by the National Institutes of Health in Wuhan, the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, as not being “gain of function” research. But the reason is unlikely to reassure Americans concerned about the lab’s risky work. The virus under study in 2017 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t “gain the function” of becoming more deadly and contagious to humans through experimentation. That’s because that virus, known as WIV1, already posed a danger to humans before any of the Wuhan lab’s engineering. (Kopp, 7/23)
Politico: ‘The Virus Is Winning’: China’s Rebuff Of WHO’s New Covid Probe Alarms Experts
Leading U.S. infectious disease experts are warning that China's rejection of a World Health Organization plan for another Covid-19 investigation inside the country threatens to deny the world critical data needed to identify and head off future pandemics. And experts told POLITICO that the denial of access to Wuhan, the original epicenter of the virus outbreak, deepens growing suspicion the Chinese government is attempting to cover up the possibility that the virus was intentionally engineered. (Kine, Paun and Heath, 7/25)
Also —
The New York Times: Fauci Wants To Make Vaccines For The Next Pandemic Before It Hits
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is promoting an ambitious and expensive plan to prepare for such nightmare scenarios. It would cost “a few billion dollars” a year, take five years for the first crop of results and engage a huge cadre of scientists, he said. The idea is to make “prototype” vaccines to protect against viruses from about 20 families that might spark a new pandemic. Using research tools that proved successful for Covid-19, researchers would uncover the molecular structure of each virus, learn where antibodies must strike it, and how to prod the body into making exactly those antibodies. (Kolata, 7/25)
