'Show Me A School, Factory That I Shut Down': Anthony Fauci Absolves Himself Of Responsibility For Lockdowns

Former top US infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has absolved himself of the responsibility for America's botched response to Covid-19 pandemic.

"Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down. Never. I never did," Fauci said in an interview with the New York Times.

Fauci, the former director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was one of the lead members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force (later succeeded by White House Covid-19 Response Team), and has been the face of the Covid-19 handling of both Trump and Biden administrations.

When asked about who was at fault for America's botched response to Covid-19, Fauci passed on the blame to US Centers For Disease Control (CDC) and the other public health apparatuses for which Fauci became a willing personification.

"I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the CDC's recommendation, and people made a decision based on that," Fauci said.

"I'm not an economist. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not an economic organisation. The surgeon general is not an economist. So we looked at it from a purely public-health standpoint," he added.

"It was for other people to make broader assessments - people whose positions include but aren't exclusively about public health. Those people have to make the decisions about the balance between the potential negative consequences of something versus the benefits of something," Fauci said.

However, Fauci from the start of the pandemic was pushing the then Trump administration to tell states to lock down.

"No bars, no restaurants, no nothing. Only essential services. When you get a place like New York or Washington or California, you have got to ratchet it up," Fauci told Science magazine in an interview in mid-March 2020, reports the Reason.

Fauci also denounced The Great Barrington Declaration signed by a group of epidemiologists and other public health experts in October 2020, as "nonsense and very dangerous".

The document called for a focus on protecting the vulnerable and letting everyone else resume normal life.

One of the most controversial issues Fauci confronted as the face of the pandemic response was the mask mandates that eventually spread across the nation.

Although Fauci had initially told Americans masking was unnecessary, he would later become a vocal supporter of the benefits of wearing face coverings.

He also defended his views on the origins of the pandemic, arguing that he was open to the idea that the virus could have leaked from a Chinese lab despite believing more evidence exists to support the notion that the virus originated from a Wuhan wet market.