During the Coronavirus Crisis is the man who at least on a personal level for my family made that possible. I mean, how many people do you know said they would not get vaccinated against the coronavirus unless and until dr. Fauci got vaccinated . Unless and until they heard from dr. Fauci personally that its time, that its safe. That this is how were going to beat this thing. How crucial has the Publics Trust in this one scientist been . Since the start of this global and National Nightmare . It is an unprecedented thing in american history. And dr. Anthony fauci joins us tonight for the interview. Dr. Fauci, i feel like we have a lot of catching up to do. Ive been trying to get an interview with you on the show since march. Now that theres change at the top in washington, great to finally have you here, sir. Its a real honor. Thank you very much, rachel. Its about time. Dont you think . Yes indeed. Im really glad to be here with you. Boy, do i. Let me start off by asking you just about how the new administration is starting over, the first couple of days had about 30 actions by the new president. Many of them on coronavirus. Everything from using the defense production act more to try to meet supply shortfalls, to requiring people to quarantine when they come in from other countries, to setting up a new Preclinical Program to try to advance therapeutics. Lots and lots of direct individual actions by the president right off the bat. Are there any of them that you disagree with . You know, rachel, no, i dont. I mean, this has been a very wellplanned out its the National Strategy for ever covid19 and pandemic preparedness. Its about 101page document. Its very finely detailed. And one of the things that i found really very encouraging and gratifying in the meetings that ive had, you know, first before, just a few days before the actual inauguration, and then yesterday, for example, when i was with the president and the Vice President , to things that he said to us, myself and other members of the team in private, were just so encouraging. I mean, he said, let science speak. Let science be the thing that drives us. Lets just be open and honest and transparent. Were not going to get everything right. There will be some mistakes. There will be some missteps. The response to that is to fix it and not to point blame an point fingers. It was just an amazingly refreshing experience and conversation that we had, and he wasnt doing it for show. This was, like, behind closed doors in the white house where he was just telling the team how he wanted this to go looking forward. That was, like, on the second day that, their first day after the inauguration. So we have a plan. We have a lot of things that have already been implemented, such as the executive orders that you mentioned. I mean, i, myself, one of the first things that he asked me to do was to represent him as the leader of the delegation to the World Health Organization executive board. I get up, 3 00 in the morning, to, to be the representative at 4 00 a. M. , which was 10 00 a. M. Geneva time to do something that the rest of the world was really looking at. And that is, getting us back into the w. H. O. Making sure were an important part of the collaboration, the cooperation and the solidarity thats needed globally when you have a global pandemic. So we really hit the ground running. I know that the president , the outgoing president , i should say the former president , made this generalized case that wasnt specific to coronavirus, but made a case that International Cooperation and then us being part of international or even just multinational efforts was weakness. Was a generosity that americans shouldnt afford. Particularly at times of crisis that we should take care of ourselves. It seems clear from your enthusiasm for the u. S. Rejoining the w. H. O. That you think thats not just an act of International American benevolence. You think thats good for us . Can you explain why that is. Oh, absolutely, rachel. Its good for us and its good for the rest of the world. When you are dealing with a global pandemic, the response must be global, and if theres anything, any phenomenon which is antithetical to this idea about provincialism and nationalism and keep everybody out, that is exactly the opposite of what you need to do when youre dealing with a pandemic. By definition, pandemic, the entire planet thats involved. So in many ways were not different than other nations. Were no different than other regions, and the only way were going get this thing under control and crush it, which i feel we will, if we do it and pull together with the kind of solidarity, corporation and collaboration, it just makes no sense to think that youre going to exclude the rest of the world when youre trying to respond to a global pandemic. It just doesnt make any sense. Weve now had not that many weeks experience, a few weeks experience in our country administering the two approved vaccines we have so far, pfizer and moderna. Has anything emerged these weeks to indicate one of those is any more effective, safe or easily tolerate and that the other . Or essentially should the American Public as people find out theyve got an appointment to get vaccinated. Today i find out my aunt and mom got appointments and were going in, i burst into tears i was so happy. And asked which vaccine they were getting, im not sure what that was supposed to mean to me. Have we discerned which vaccines you got and how they work . Well, if you look at the big picture, rachel, the United States government has been involved in the development and or the facilitation of the testing of six candidates. Two of them have already been shown to be highly efficacious, 94 to 95 . Theyre the same type of vaccine. We call it a vaccine platform. This one happens to be the mrna platform. We have others that are close behind that will soon evaluated for efficacy and safety and very likely well have the same positive fate as these two. But the two that are out are essentially identical in the sense of very, very little if any discernible differences. Theyre 94 to 95 efficacious. They have a good safety record. So when people ask me, which one did you take . It just so happened that the moderna was one shipped to the nih where as you know i work. So i got the moderna one. If the pfizer one had been shipped it would havent were exactly the same. I would have said no difference whatsoever. So whatever your mother and your friends got, i believe it would make no difference if they got moderna on pfizer. How close are we to the approval of any of the onedose vaccines, and mathematically obviously thats going to make a difference in terms of the size of the pipeline, in terms of getting vaccine out to the community. How close are we to those . Real close, rachel. I would think that no more than two weeks from now. The data will be analyzed in a similar fashion. The way we analyzed it with the moderna and the pfizer candidate. That is an independent data and monitoring board. Look at the data, determine if its ready to be given to the public, to the company to go to the fda and ask to see if they could get an emergency use authorization. You know, i dont want to get ahead of them, but i have to tell you, i would be surprised if it was anymore than two weeks from now that data will be analyzed and decisions would be made. Thats really good news, as you said, because that would be if it does get an emergency use authorization, yet again another candidate that does have some differences. And thats good, because it gives a wider range of flexibility. One, its a single dose. Thats really important, because you can expect to start to see results you know, 10, 14 days or so right after and then when you get to 28 days you probably continue to go up. But it has a less stringent cold chain requirement. Which is really good. By moving it around and making sure you dont waste doses. Do we have any Lessons Learned so far in terms of distributing the vaccine most efficiently . Not in the abstract and not in the generic sense but getting it into americans arms right now in 2021 . Are there some settings or delivery sites we thought would make sense to give vaccinations that havent been all that good at it, that we should shift away from . Are there Lessons Learned already . There really is. It hasnt been perfect when it goes from the delivery and the distribution into peoples arms. We like to have done better. I think you can you can abstract it and go back and say well, we planned this. It looks like its going well. Then when you get on the phone and talk to people, as i say in the trenching you see that not everybody is perfect. In some respects, thats understandable because its a new process thats just been initiated. However, getting back to the plan i mentioned that you asked me about, that President Biden had put forth is that theres a very strong emphasis on getting the vaccines, one, more of them. The equipment that you need. Using the defense production act, to get as much as we can, and making sure we put into place at the local level the capability of getting it to people in a situation where it might be difficult. Community vaccine centers, getting pharmacies involved. Getting mobile units involved. So one thing weve learned that the science and the development of the vaccine has been breathtaking, i might say. I mean, we did something in less than 11 months. About 11 months that normally would have taken years to get a vaccine that goes from the identification of a brand new virus to the time youre actually injecting it into people. A successful vaccine that is safe and effective. Thats unprecedented. Now what weve got to do is get the logistics getting it distributed and into peoples arms in an efficient way. Were not there yet. There have been missteps. Weve got to do better. What the president and Vice President have said is the goal, which i think is a challenging goal, but a reasonable goal, to get 100 million doses, not doses. Get 100 Million People vaccinated in the first 100 days. So thats the thing were going to strive for. Ultimately you want to get the overwhelming majority of the population, and i would think that would have to be about 75 excuse me, 70 to 85 percent of the population to get that umbrella of herd immunity, which then when we get there, rachel, when you Start Talking about getting back to some form of normality. In order to do that you have to pull out all stoppers and get as many vaccinated as possible and thats the plan as part of the National Strategy. I feel like theres, started to understand this as sort of different columns of necessity, and one of them is science. As you describe. It was a breathtaking Scientific Achievement to have the development of safe and effective vaccines that quickly. Then weve got the implementation, which is a logistics and governance thing in terms of getting shots into peoples arms. But then also the Public Health issue of prevention, and on that weve been terrible. Even with all of the success in column one and the hopefully the new commitment to column two, on prevent, still having hundreds of thousands of americans infected every day, and for them, and especially having something close to me get very sick with the illness. Ive been focused on the issue of therapeutics. Treatment for people who didnt get the vaccine in time. For whom previous didnt work, who did get it. I know thats a new focus, too. What can you tell us about, if anythings on the horizon in terms of treating people already sick to prevent them from dying . Yeah, thats something we really are challenged with and have to do better. We have treatments now relatively speaking, more effective for people with advanced disease to prevent them from dying and prevent them from having a deteriorating course. So, for example, there have been Clinical Trials that have shown in individuals hospitalized, even those who require mechanical ventilation or who have a requirement for highflow oxygen. If you give them a drug and a randomized placebocontrolled drug called dexamethasone, you can diminish significantly the 28day mortality. We have monoclonal antibodies, which are antibodies specific for the virus that you can derive from individuals by taking their cells out and having those cells produce these antibodies. There are a number of them that have been promising enough that they have been granted emergency use authorization. Weve got to get more of that, and weve got to give it to people earlier. But the real goal, rachel, is to do what we did so successfully with hiv. To get direct, acting antiviral drugs so that when someone comes in with symptoms to prevent them from going in the hospital, you might give them a seven to tenday course, unlike hiv, which requires a lifetime of course, but the same type of drug. One thats a very powerful drug, directly acting on the virus itself. Thats something that were putting a lot of effort in, and when we get that, that will really turn around the entire situation of our ability to prevent someone from progressing and going into a state where they really have advanced disease. Thats the sort of theory of the case for the best shot for therapeutics, but is there anything that looks promising along those lines already . Or is this something thats years away in terms of development . No. Well, you know, normally under business as usualtype things it might have been years away. But there are a number of companies that have candidates that theyre looking at, that might look pretty, you know, the companies are a little shy about telling you about things. But being at the nih where we fund scientists that are doing this, i think its going to be much sooner than we think. That once you get something that looks like its a hit, as we call it, namely, something that really does act. You get it into a phase one trial quickly and because the situation is so dire in the sense of the need for therapeutics, you move it along. You dont just want to forget about safety. Safety is always important. If you can show its safe, has good antiviral activity we can move relatively quickly on that. As i mentioned there are a couple of candidates looking promising in the test tube, and then from there you go to an animal model and then get it into humans. Dr. Fauci, what do you tell people who are dealing with a longterm symptom from covid . People who technically recovered but still have impairment months later . Some stuff for some is very severe. Months after they have, you know, technically recovered from the disease theyre still not able to work. People have longterm and very serious conventions. Is that something thats being studied systematically . Oh, very much so, rachel. This is a real phenomenon. I, myself, personally, am dealing and helping a number of people who have a postacute covid19 syndrome just as you accurately described. They are virologically okay. The virus is no longer identified in them, but they have persistence of symptoms that can be debilitating. Extreme fatigue. Muscle aches, temperature disregulation. Some even have situations where what they call brain fog. Its very difficult for them to focus or to concentrate. It can be really quite disturbing. We are doing a lot on that. We had a workshop in december that my institute sponsored bringing in experts from all over the country and the world. Were going make a major investment in Research Dollars to try and find out the full extent of this, and any hints towards what the underlying mechanisms are, what we can do to treat it. We take it very seriously for the simple reason that even if a small fraction, and it appears to be more than just a small fraction of people, have persistent symptoms, when you look at the 24 million, 25 Million People in the United States who have been infected, albeit not all had symptoms but even those who have symptoms and globally, when you have approaching 100 Million People having been infected, this could be something that really could be an issue. Thats the reason why were taking it very seriously. Very, very happy to hear you describe it that way and to know about your personal involvement. Dr. Fauci, would you mind sticking with us just a second . Were going to take a quick break, but i havent even scraped the surface of the things i want to ask you about yet. Sure. Great. Well be right back with dr. Anthony fauci right after this. Stay with us. loud music noises quiet piano music comfort in the extreme. The lincoln family of luxury suvs. New years resolutions come and go. So give your business more than resolutions. Give it solutions, from comcast business. Work more efficiently with fast internet and advanced wifi. Make your business safer with powerful cybersecurity solutions. And stay productive with 24 7 support. Make this years resolution better solutions. Bounce forward with comcast business. Get started with a powerful internet and voice solution for just 64. 90 a month. Plus, for a limited time, ask how to get a 500 prepaid card when you upgrade. Switch today. So now you having this shot, like a weight off your shoulder . Peace of mind . Yes, it does. Gives me a lot of peace of mind. I believe in science, and i dont think dr. Fauci would be on tv every day telling people to take the vaccine if it wasnt good for them. Because thats how much respect i have for him. Maureen weill getting her vaccine dose in new orleans, louisiana. Telling us that she got it in part because she has faith in science and knows that dr. Fauci wouldnt tell you to get the vaccine unless it was time to gets the vaccine. Were back now with dr. Anthony fauci as the nations top Infectious Disease doctor, more than 30 years at the nih. Doctor, i know how much you know the American People have faith in you and have trusted you. I want to tell you that i have not only have faith and trust in you. I have faith in the career scientists throughout the nih and cdc and other god standards Gold StandardResearch Agencies that we are blessed with across the country. But over the course of the year i have been a little freaked out about how the cdc in particular just g