Dr. Anthony Fauci: We can always look back and see how we could've done a better job

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), discusses what the U.S. and world could've done better to respond to COVID-19

Video Transcript

ANTHONY FAUCI: I am in close contact with my scientific colleagues and my public health colleagues, which long, long, long and debated COVID-19. So those relationships stayed the same.

The part of your question, when you look at what we've done, could we have done anything different? It really depends on what you mean. From a scientific standpoint, I think what is going to turn out-- and I hope so, I don't want to get overconfident in it-- but I think one of the real successes that we're going to see over the next couple of months is what's happened in the arena of vaccines as well as, in some extent, newer and better therapeutics. So I think we can look forward to something positive there.

Could we have done things better from a public health standpoint? Of course. Whenever you're dealing with a very difficult situation like that, you can always look back and say there were things that we could have done better and that we should have done better. But that's just the nature of the situation we're in.

I think anyone who says we've done everything perfectly is really not looking at the reality of the fact that when you have such challenges like that, whether you're in Europe or in Asia or in the United States, we could always look back and say we could have done a better job.