After Anthony Fauci, MD, announced April 27 that the U.S. is "out of the pandemic phase" in regards to COVID-19, citing low infection rates, hospitalization rates and deaths, four health leaders responded to his claims, with many urging caution, in a May 1 Fortune article.
Here are the responses from the four leaders.
- Georges Benjamin, MD., Executive Director of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Benjamin told Fortune that Dr. Fauci was "just being inartful." Commenting on the pandemic, Dr. Benjamin said, "The one predictable thing is that it's unpredictable," warning that the virus has fooled health officials very often.
- Panagis Galiasatos, MD. Assistant Professor of Medicine at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine. Dr. Galiastos said health officials need to be careful with what they say, but that "masks work, stay at home [when you’re sick], quarantine as you see fit — these are weapons that [can] keep COVID from being life-threatening. I think that’s what he’s trying to get at. The pandemic is here, but we should take into account that many countries are in a different place."
- Phoebe Lostroh, PhD. Associate Professor of Microbiology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. "I think he made a faux pas even saying the acute phase is over," Dr. Lostroh said. "It’s over for those of us who have been vaccinated and boosted, and those of us who have enough money to get anything delivered to our homes so we don’t have to go out in high density areas, who don’t have young children exposed over and over again, who can afford masks."
- Arijit Chakravarty, PhD. CEO of Fractal Therapeutics. "If you look at the interventions we have today, the actual things in your control, probably the single most effective intervention, two years in, is an N95 mask" said Dr. Chakravarty. "I wish I didn’t live in a world where that was the state of the art, where we had to figure out our own strategy to avoid being infected." He also said that wishing that the pandemic were over doesn't make it so.