Fauci says COVID-19 has all the characteristics of his 'worst nightmare'

We are living through Dr. Anthony Fauci's worst nightmare.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a recorded message on Tuesday that Ebola is "scary" and HIV, "as important as it is, was drawn out and over an extended period of time," but his biggest fear has always been a new respiratory infection that was transmitted from animals to humans and is highly contagious.

COVID-19 has all of those characteristics, so "now we have something that turned out to be my worst nightmare," he said. "In the period of four months it has devastated the world." The virus has infected more than seven million people worldwide and left at least 112,000 Americans dead.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Because the pandemic is still in its early stages, "the thing we don't yet fully appreciate is what happens when you get infected and you get a serious disease and you recover. What are the longterm durable negative effects of that infection?" While this crisis is nowhere near over, Fauci said, he believes there will be "more than one winner" when it comes to COVID-19 vaccines, as pharmaceutical companies have been working at an "unprecedented" speed, outpacing the "public health response in some respect, which you usually see it opposite."