Fauci: The US political division over masks led to half a million COVID-19 deaths

Anthony FauciAnthony FauciPublix offers employees who receive the COVID-19 vaccine a gift card from 5 stores on Sunday shows – COVID-19 dominates as grim milestone nears Fauci: 500,000 coronavirus deaths ‘devastating’ MORE, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said on Monday that political divisions over the use of masks have contributed to the US coronavirus death rate.

Fauci made the comments on the same day that the country’s death toll reached half a million people a year after the pandemic broke out. Fauci called the grim milestone “astonishing” in an interview with Reuters, saying that the gap between the wearing of masks, which politically divided Americans during a presidential election year, turned the public health measure into a political statement.

“Even under the best of circumstances, this would have been a very serious problem,” said Fauci.

However, that doesn’t explain how a rich and developed country can have the most deaths and be the hardest hit country in the world, Fauci said.

Fauci also called the contempt by some governors and mayors of recommendations for how to reopen the country safely after near-nationwide lockdowns last spring “incomprehensible”.

“When the American mind was so divided, it made me really sad,” he said.

While Fauci would not place all the blame on the former Trump administration, he noted that “the lack of involvement at the top of the leadership in trying to do everything scientifically substantiated was clearly detrimental to the effort.”

While the US makes up 4 percent of the world’s population, it has nearly 20 percent of all deaths from the coronavirus, according to Reuters.

“This is the worst that has happened to this country in regards to the country’s health in more than 100 years,” Fauci said.

Fauci told Reuters it was difficult to predict when the pandemic would be over due to the emergence of new coronavirus variants from South Africa and Brazil. Some studies have shown that these strains are more resistant to the existing coronavirus vaccines.

Fauci has suggested that Americans could get back to pre-pandemic life by Christmas, but warned that restrictions could last until next year.