Dr. Anthony Fauci discusses the coronavirus with Dr. Francis Collins

Posted byChaplainmikePosted inFaith & Science, Mike the Geologist

See this video for a discussion between Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci on COVID-19.  Go and watch two people who know what they are talking about discuss this issue.  Thanks to the BioLogos Forum for the hat tip.  A couple of things I noted:

Dr. Collins asks Dr. Fauci about the current state of the pandemic.  Fauci answers that it’s not good, premature reopening has caused a resurgence of the virus.  We are still “knee-deep” in the first wave and now it’s surging upward.

Dr. Fauci recommends:

  1. Wear a mask in public
  2. Maintain physical distance from other people
  3. Avoid crowds

Dr. Fauci wants to warn young people to take the pandemic seriously:

  1. They can get very sick
  2. They can contribute to the pandemic propagation if they are not careful.

Dr. Fauci is hopeful that by the end of the year a vaccine may be developed but they will not rush it.  The vaccine must be both SAFE and EFFECTIVE.

They both stressed that the public health effort should not be viewed in opposition to the economic effort.  The public health effort is a pathway to get to a safe reopening, not an obstacle.

Dr. Fauci concludes “Everybody hang in there, good science will come through for us.”

 

37 thoughts on “Dr. Anthony Fauci discusses the coronavirus with Dr. Francis Collins”

  2. That just shows your Little FAITH (unlike HIS). Tsk. Tsk.
    Otherwise you would be Prepared To Meet Thy God.

    Check back with him after he tests positive and/or needs hospitalization. They often sing a different hymn when it happens to THEM, and you can then recite his own Spiritual Wisdom(TM) right back to him.

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  4. Fairfax County Public Schools have essentially stated that they, not POTUS, will decide what is best for their students and staff.

    “There are too many Disloyal Americans.”
    — Wondering Eagle’s regular Trump-fanatic troll

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  5. I know.
    Barron has FOUR strikes to overcome from the get-go:
    1) Autism; apparently he’s mostly functional, but as someone in a fandom full of low-end Autistics, I know how much of a strain it can be.
    2) Famous Father Syndrome. On Steroids.
    3) And THAT kind of father, who has had his attorneys force NDA gag orders on others in his family.
    4) Growing up in the media circus/piranha tank of Trump Tower DC (formerly The White House). To the point Obama’s daughters offered their experiences to help him cope.
    And he has to know that his only value is as an expendable extension of his father’s ego and tool of his father’s ambitions. At least if things go “I Claudius” he’s like Claudius, who survived because nobody considered him a threat. (And became Ceasar as the only survivor of the Imperial family after all the others poisoned and knifed each other for the throne.)

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  8. If you can justify that comment please remain in the weeds well hidden behind your holy than Thou persona

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  9. David, that’s bad news! I honestly think it is about time we will come to know someone who is sick, the way the virus is so easily spreading and when it’s your own family that is ‘too close to home’, you bet. Your family has my prayers for safe recovery.

    We have a lot of time left in the trump era for this thing to spread, and I try to be hopeful that people will wise up about it, but no, there are some that are very unwilling to take responsibility for keeping the guidelines for community safety. Still, sorry to hear your news.

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  11. I have a neighbor who is rather dismissive about precautions: “when his time comes, it comes,” he says.

    And he doesn’t much care if your time also comes when his does as a result of his carelessness.

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  13. I don’t think Dana was referring to the issue of nepotism, HUG. Go easy on the kid . Imagine you were a sensitive kid — which I know for certain you were — and that man was your father. With or without challenged ability, getting through the teenage years would be a gauntlet of psychologically damaging obstacles. I suspect his mother is doing her best to protect him from the tsunami of shit he has to deal with. God help the boy.

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  14. If certain cultural values have ever stood out as being enormously helpful in times like these, it must surely be how East Asian schoolchildren are required to help clean their own classrooms and dining halls DAILY, even mopping the floors with a towel by hand. Not hard in places like Japan or Taiwan to get children to follow basic personal hygiene. Opening schools is far, far easier as a result.

    We were doing well if we remembered to put up our chairs on our desks as a favor to the janitor….

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  15. It just seems rather convenient that they found their faith in God’s sovereignty and timing right when they might be asked to inconvenience themselves for the safety of others…

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  16. Fairfax County is a wealthy place. If they have to, they can absorb the additional costs. I wish that were true for all school districts. Trump cares a great deal more about his re-election chances than about children’s education, I’m sure, or he wouldn’t be making threats that are likely to endanger their health, and the health of those around them.

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  17. +100

    I’m delighted that my old stomping grounds said it first. They’re a DC suburb, so that’s likely to get under Trump’s skin pretty badly.

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  18. My daughter is a school teacher who teaches elementary children advanced math. The school district where she teaches is a middle to lower socio-economic area. She has very mixed feelings about reopening. Kids will not comply easily with even easy preventive recommendations. Who will supervise hand washing, keeping their hands away from their faces, keeping their hands to themselves, wiping snot from faces? Social distancing? Ha. On and on. Use your imagination. Kids are not s sterile little creatures. So reopening schools is a complicated matter. It won’t be easy to do it right, because no one knows what “right” is. There are risks both ways.

    Plus she called me a few minutes ago. Her sister-in-law and her husband have the virus. The husband is sick. They have both been with the father-in-law whose wife is in a nursing home recovering from a fall. So my daughter and her dairy farmer husband have both been exposed. I won’t be seeing my daughter now for several weeks. She will be tested, but the results of tests are slow in coming.

    I have a neighbor who is rather dismissive about precautions: “when his time comes, it comes,” he says. He wears a mask part of the time. He attends a church that is already meeting again and one or two people have died from COVID.

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  19. Maybe so, but their decision may be swayed by someone holding a fiscal gun to their heads.

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  22. > Getting fired or resigning means a WORSE HACK…

    Agree. This kind of situation, faced by many experts in many areas, is always uncomfortable, and sometimes gross; but the alternative is …?

    Reality is Messy.

    I’ve often sat in a meeting wishing the resident expert would just cut loose. The usually don’t, and that is usually the right call. 😦

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  24. “I think it’s worth acknowledging that *not* going to school is doing a lot of damage to kids, both because distance learning just doesn’t work …..”

    Michael Z – agreed. I have kids at home and the half-hearted attempt by the schools to do distance learning (here’s your assignment – look it up on the internet or join this discussion group) is beyond these kids discipline even when there is a parent at home. I have a daughter in 11th grade taking calculus and she was struggling.

    I am running a religious ed program for our catholic church and we are planning for the fall – aa mixture of distancing in a classroom setting (small class sizes) and zoom meetings. Will be a tough year.

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  25. Fairfax County Public Schools have essentially stated that they, not POTUS, will decide what is best for their students and staff.

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  28. I certainly hope that LOCAL boards of ed. will sort out when and how to ‘re-start’ school attendance so that it is SAFE for all concerned.

    Adults can choose to shelter or not, but children are at the mercy of the choices of the likes of Donald Trump, and those Boards of Ed. were elected by PARENTS who want someone to protect and care for their children’s welfare.

    DT and his ilk can keep their hands off of the nation’s children (and yes, we notice that the rich are sheltering their own children from the virus as private education is not going to follow allowing the kids to be put in harm’s way, of course)

    I hate it when our CHILDREN are being targeted by these political fiends. End of rant.

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  29. But I, for one, want him to stay in his job. Getting fired or resigning means a WORSE HACK gets the job…

    Such as autistic teenager Barron Trump.
    Who has the best possible qualification for the job — his last name.

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  30. We already tried lockdown, and we had little stomach for even the half-hearted attempt we made this spring. I fear that whipsaw openings and closings are the path we have defaulted to – when ch will only make containing the virus harder, and the economic ramifications worse.

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  31. I think it’s worth acknowledging that *not* going to school is doing a lot of damage to kids, both because distance learning just doesn’t work and because of the psychological effects of isolation at a time in their lives when social interaction is actually vital to healthy development. And on top of that there’s all the services schools provide for kids besides education.

    On the other hand, if we put all the kids back in school full time they will essentially serve the same function for the coronavirus as rats did for the bubonic plague, so that’s not a good option either. 🙂 As with the economy, the best solution is probably to lock down as strictly as possible until there’s no sign of community transmission, and then to reopen schools, rather than having a long and drawn out cycle of opening and closing.

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  32. Robert, note I amended the post so that “Everybody hang in there, good science will come through for us” is reflected as a Fauci quote. Sadly, the cowering that good scientists like Fauci and other CDC members have to put up with so they don’t lose their jobs is distressing to me also. Fauci walks the tightrope between obsequiousness and blunt speaking as best he can. But I, for one, want him to stay in his job. Getting fired or resigning means a WORSE HACK gets the job, something I don’t think helps the country. Fauci takes opportunities like this video to bluntly say what he really thinks, which is probably the best he can do right now. I’ve been in situations where my employer took a controversial, and as it turned out, a wrong-headed approach to solving a problem. I had to “toe-the-company-line” in public, but I worked behind the scene to change the policy. I was ultimately successful. That’s my hope for Fauci, I’d rather have him there trying to mitigate the worst of Trump’s policies, than not. That’s my feeling, anyway.

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  34. It’s quite simple. For most families, school is free day care. If schools are closed, many families can’t get back to work. If people can’t get back to work, the economy will continue to tank. And if the economy continues to tank, You Know Who’s chances of rejection will continue to plummet. So it is imperative, you understand, that schools be open by the fall. The future depends on it.

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  36. I’m getting tired of seeing that damned coronavirus image, you know, the one Collins is holding up a model of in his hand. That’s that go-to image at the top of every other online article about the coronavirus pandemic. I understand it’s convenient and easy to use this, no creativity required, but I think I’d rather a piece of dog feces instead at this point.

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  37. Fauci answers that it’s not good, premature reopening has caused a resurgence of the virus.

    And yet, because president Trump complained that its guidelines for school reopening in the Fall are too stringent and “impractical”, according to news reports yesterday VP Pence said the CDC was revising those guidelines. Good science will come through for us? Only if the scientists find a way, and have a will, to get around the politicians and the politics, and don’t let science be subverted by policy. What happened right out in plain sight for everybody who was paying attention to see yesterday is that science was subverted by policy with regard to school reopening, and such subversion must decreases public faith in scientists and official scientific recommendations — it certainly decreases mine.

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