Lawrence Wright's in-depth piece on America's Plague Year (via The New Yorker)
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I asked Dr. Fauci about the global-preparedness study calling America the nation best prepared for a pandemic. What happened? He emitted a despairing laugh and said, “We never got back to baseline”—the point when the contagion had been reduced enough to allow contact tracing to minimize spread. “It could be the fact that we didn’t have a uniform strategy,” he went on. “It could be our own culture right now, of people not wanting to be told what to do. The guidelines say ‘Don’t go to bars. Wear a mask.’ And you look at the pictures in the newspaper and on TV and you see large crowds of mostly young people, not wearing masks.”
Fauci, who has led niaid through six Administrations, has never seen this level of distrust and anger in the country. “Political divisiveness doesn’t lend itself to having a coördinated, coöperative, collaborative response against a common enemy,” he said. “There is also this pushback in society against anything authoritative, and scientists are perceived as being authority, so that’s the reason I believe we have an anti-science trend, which leads to an anti-vaccine trend.” Even with an effective vaccine—or several of them—social resistance could delay the longed-for herd immunity.
I asked Fauci if he’d been threatened. “Oh, my goodness,” he said. “Harassing my wife and my children. It’s really despicable. It’s this dark-Web group of people who are ultra-ultra-ultra-far-right crazies. They somehow got the phone numbers of my children, they’ve tracked them where they work, they’ve harassed them with texts, some threatening, some obscene. We have gotten multiple death threats, my wife and I.” He sighed and said, “It is what it is.”
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