In his final White House press briefing today, Dr. Anthony Fauci urged Americans to get Covid booster shots.
“We know it’s safe,” said Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. “We know that it is effective. So my message and my final message, maybe the final message I give you from this podium, is that please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get your updated Covid-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible to protect yourself, your family and your community.”
Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden, announced earlier this year his departure in December from government service.
Reflecting on his nearly half-century in government service, which included his high-profile role as de facto medical fact-checker to the former President Donald Trump, Fauci said, “What I would like people to remember about what I’ve done is that every day for all of those years I’ve given it everything that I have and I’ve never left anything on the field.”
Asked about the “dubious medical advice” coming from the Trump administration during the early crucial months of the Covid pandemic – at one point Trump suggested sunlight and injections of disinfectants should be investigated as treatments – Fauci said, “I contradicted those [statements] which set off a whole series of things in my life. The people who have correct information, who take science seriously, who don’t have strange way-out theories about things, need to speak up more because the other side that just keeps putting out misinformation and disinformation seems to be tireless in that effort.”
Fauci also said that he will “cooperate fully” with any House oversight hearings after Republicans take control in January. “You may not know,” Fauci said, “but I have testified before the Congress a few hundred times, OK? So I have no trouble testifying. We can defend and explain and stand by everything that we said. So I have nothing to hide.”
Watch C-Span clips of Fauci’s press briefing above.
