Fauci: We May Never Know If Lockdowns Were Worth It or Not

As President Joe Biden prepares to address the status of America’s fight against COVID-19 Wednesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci has said it is difficult to say if the extensive measures, including lockdowns, taken to prevent transmission of the coronavirus were worth it.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to determine what the right balance is,” Fauci said. “I think the restrictions, if you want to use that word, which I tend to shy away from, lockdowns, they certainly prevented a lot of infections, prevented a lot of hospitalizations, and prevented a lot of deaths. There’s no doubt about that.”

When speaking with the BBC’s Sophie Raworth on Sunday, the White House chief medical adviser said it is difficult to balance the negative impacts with the positive outcomes.

“Obviously, when you do have that kind of restriction on society, there are unintended negative consequences, particularly in children who are not allowed to go to school, in the psychological and mental health aspects it has on children, in the economic stress that it puts on society in general, on individual families,” Fauci said. “Obviously, those are negative consequences that are unintended. One has to look at the balance of lives saved, hospitalizations avoided.”

‘OVER THE WHOLE COVID THING’: AUSTRALIANS ARE NOT SO QUICK TO GET BOOSTED

Fauci added that he cannot say whether future lockdowns will be needed, admitting that the idea of them now “has a charged element to it.”

“I believe that we must keep our eye on the pattern of what we’re seeing with infections,” Fauci said. “Right now, I’ll take the United States, for example, the cases continue to go down, the hospitalizations go down, and the deaths go down. We are going in a gradual way towards what we all hope will be normal.”

However, Fauci noted that the U.S. should expect to see what the United Kingdom is experiencing with a resurgence of the omicron variant, particularly the BA.2 subvariant. He could not say what the next winter would look like.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Raworth also pressed Fauci on greater clarity regarding the origin of the virus, asking if the scientific community was too quick to say COVID-19 happened naturally and did not come from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

“I don’t think they were dismissing it,” Fauci said, insisting he was never certain about the origin. “I think it has been misinterpreted. Everyone has always kept an open mind.”