Fact Check: Did Fauci say we’re 'never' going back to normal?
Some journalists are claiming that a new audio recording of Dr. Anthony Fauci reveals that the doctor has admitted that the government will “never … ever” allow life to return to normal, at least what was considered normal before COVID-19. One went so far as to label Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser for its response to the coronavirus, as “Dr. Evil” for permanently taking normal life away from Americans.
Two weeks?
Fauci is indeed moving the goalposts. Almost two years have passed since the leading public health official explained to the lay public in March 2020, that,
“If you look at the curves of outbreaks, they go big peaks, and then come down. What we need to do is flatten that down.”
The White House agreed with Fauci and asked the public to suffer through “two weeks of shelter-in-place orders” to flatten that curve.
A graph widely publicized by the CDC to support Fauci’s claim showed the curve flattening and eventually coming to a zero point, an end to new cases and an end to protective measures.
That end point has quite certainly not been reached, with record numbers of new cases, the very parameter that was to be flattened, as seen in the below graph from February 1, 2022, and with a continuation of the “new normal.”
Fauci’s Confession
A bombshell report by the New York Times revealed, at the end of December 2020, that
“Dr. Fauci acknowledged that he had slowly but deliberately been moving the goal posts … ’When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70% to 75%,’ Dr. Fauci said. ‘Then, when newer surveys said 60% or more would take it, I thought, 'I can nudge this up a bit,' so I went to 80, 85.’”
What is normal?
In February 2021, Fauci even changed the definition of normal:
“And again, it really depends on what you mean, by normality … because if normality means exactly the way things were before we had this happen to us, I mean, I can’t predict that.”
“But I mean, obviously, I think we’re going to have a significant degree of normality, beyond what the terrible burden that all of us have been through over the last year, that as we get into the fall and the winter, by the end of the year, I agree with the president completely, that we will be approaching a degree of normality, it may or may not be precisely the way it was in November of 2019,” he added. “But it’ll be much, much better than what we’re doing right now.”
Good Doctor, Bad Doctor?
In August 2021, Fauci tried to take an optimistic tone. In an interview with CNN,
“Dr. Anthony Fauci urged the public to get vaccinated and said if the ‘overwhelming majority’ of the population does so the US could have the pandemic ‘under control’ by spring 2022.”
The Guardian interpreted Fauci’s use of the words “under control” to mean that, “The US could have the Covid pandemic under control and achieve a return to “normality” by next spring ...”
What’s new?
In a new audio recording, Fauci is heard saying,
“That doesn’t mean that it’s gonna be exactly the way it was 3 or 4 years ago. But I think when it comes to travel, school, workplace, entertainment, we’ll start to see a gradual return to normal, even though normal will not be exactly the way it was before all of this.”
This is not very different from Fauci’s February 2021 statement that normality “may or may not be precisely the way it was.” But that statement was in response to a question of what things will be like in 2022.
This recording, not being complete, could be Fauci’s description of the near future or the distant one. It is ambiguous in this regard and Fauci is not heard using the word “never.”
VERDICT
Partly true: While Fauci makes clear that he is advocating for the continuation of limits that preclude a return to the normal way things were, there is no evidence that he is calling for the limits to become permanent barriers to freedom.
