Dr. Anthony Fauci: We Can’t “Balance Lives Against the Economy” in Coronavirus Fight

Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned that saving lives must be the priority while battling Covid-19. The nation’s top infectious disease expert explained that the public’s health had to come first.

Fauci gave an interview to the Journal of the American Medical Association on Thursday as deaths from Coronavirus approached 130,000. The interview was uploaded to YouTube.

“You have people who think in one direction and those who think in the other,” Fauci said.

“We’re in an unprecedented pandemic,” he said.

“We haven’t seen anything like this for the last 102 years in 1918, and this is something that we need to take very seriously because there’s so many implications of it.”

“You don’t want to balance lives against the economy,” Fauci explained.

“So let’s get public health to help us to get the economy open as opposed to two opposing forces.”

In the same interview, Fauci warned that the Coronavirus may have mutated and become even more infectious.

“The data is showing there’s a single mutation that makes the virus be able to replicate better and maybe have high viral loads,” he said.

“We don’t have a connection to whether an individual does worse with this or not; it just seems that the virus replicates better and may be more transmissible.”

Follow Darragh Roche on Twitter

Darragh Roche

Darragh Roche is a journalist covering U.S. politics and media