Fauci admits school closures were not a good idea
LAUSD School Board member Nick Melvoin joins Fox & Friends after Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted keeping schools closed for a year was a bad idea and discusses Los Angeles’ move to ban smartphones during the school day.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the U.S. response to the coronavirus pandemic, was hospitalized with West Nile virus (WNV) earlier this month, a report said, citing his spokesman.
Fauci, 83, was hospitalized for six days before returning home, where he is now recovering, the Washington Post reports.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s former high-ranking infectious disease official is expected to fully recover from his illness. The virus is most commonly transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito.
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Former NIAID director Dr. Anthony Fauci was hospitalized with West Nile virus earlier this month and is now recovering at home, a report said. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images, main subject, E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images, top right, NIH-NIAID/IMAGE POINT FR/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images, bottom right.)
The virus first entered the United States in 1999 and is the most common cause of mosquito-borne disease there, according to the CDC.
Symptoms include fever, headache, body aches, vomiting, diarrhea or rash, although the vast majority – about 80% – of people infected with WNV do not show any symptoms. There are no vaccines or treatments for the virus.
In most cases, the virus is spread when Culex mosquitoes bite infected birds and then humans and other animals, the CDC website says. Last year, more than 1,800 people were hospitalized with the virus in the U.S., resulting in 182 deaths, according to CDC data.
Fauci was the former director of the National Institution of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID) and a leader on former President Trump’s and former President Biden’s coronavirus response teams. Before his retirement, he had worked in the American public health sector for over 50 years, advising every president since former President Reagan.
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Dr. Fauci will be sworn in before testifying before the House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Special Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic in the Rayburn House Office Building on June 3, 2024. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
A regular guest on news programs, primetime television, late-night shows and podcasts throughout the pandemic, Fauci offered his medical advice. Over time, he became a politically divisive figure on both the left and right when it came to issues such as masks, lockdown measures and the origins of COVID-19.
He famously clashed in committee hearings with Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and whether his department at the National Institutes of Health was funding gain-of-function research.
Paul claims that government officials from 15 federal agencies knew as early as 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was attempting to create a coronavirus like COVID-19. These officials, Paul says, knew that the Chinese lab was proposing to create a COVID-19-like virus, and none of these officials disclosed this plan to the public.
In June, during testimony before the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, he denied that he had tried to suppress the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. The subcommittee reviewed classified State Department records that members said “credibly suggest” that COVID-19 originated from a “lab accident in Wuhan, China” and that the Chinese Communist Party “attempted to cover up the lab leak.”
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Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined the White House COVID-19 Response Team’s regular conference call with the National Governors Association on Monday, December 27, 2021, in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus in Washington. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
In addition, Fauci said there has been no controlled study to justify six-foot social distancing, and he defended mandatory vaccinations for students, employees and the military, saying, “Vaccines save lives. It’s very, very clear that vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of people around the world.”
“It clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people at the beginning, but the effect of preventing infections did not last long. It was measured in months,” he added.
Fox News’ Danielle Wallace contributed to this report.
