Consider This from NPR - The Day Everything Changed: Fauci, Collins Reflect On 1 Year Of The Pandemic

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

March 11 will mark one year since the World Health Organization officially declared the coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic — when schools, businesses and workplaces began shutting down. To mark the moment, two of the nation's top public health officials who have helped lead the U.S. response to the pandemic — Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins — spoke to NPR about what they've learned, what they regret and why they're hopeful about the year ahead. Hear their full interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly.Collins is the Director of the National Institutes of Health and Fauci is the chief medical adviser to President Biden. And NPR's Brianna Scott reports on how some Americans remember March 11. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York, working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. The patient was a young woman in her early 30s. She had diabetes, high blood pressure, and a twin sister. Grover Nicodemus Street remembers that part of it well. She had a twin sister who would always call me every day and she would tell her sister

that she's the strongest person that she knows. Even though the patient was intubated, sedated, paralyzed, these people, I think they could still hear, you know, oddly enough. Grover's a travel nurse. He spent this past year working in COVID wards all over the country. And that patient of his, she suffered mostly alone, like millions of people have in hospital rooms all over the world. And I would go in her room, I would put my hand on

her shoulder. I would sing her church hymns. You know, I grew up in a church and she was a Christian and her sister said that she would love for me to pray with her. And I would do that just for her sister and for the patient. Grover says that woman was the most memorable patient he's had, not just over the course of the pandemic, over the course of his whole career. She was my most memorable because she was the first patient that I have ever had in 20 plus years as a nurse that died on me. The first, but not the last. I have seen, you know, probably 3,000 deaths throughout the year. And this is a scar.

This is a scar that's going to last a long time. In just one year, the pandemic has left its scar on the world. At least two and a half million people dead, nearly one in five of them died in the U.S. We were trying to deal with a true public health crisis of unprecedented magnitude and impact. Dr. Anthony Fauci. It became very, very clear that we were in for the long haul, that this was not something that was going to be easily well contained. Consider this. What do you remember about the moment that everything changed? And the nation's top public health officials, what could they have done differently? We talked to Anthony Fauci and

Francis Collins about what they've learned and what they regret, and why they're optimistic about the year to come. From NPR, I'm Adi Kornish. It's Wednesday, March 10th. This message comes from NPR sponsor 3M, who is using science and innovation to help the world respond to COVID-19. 3M plants are running around the clock, producing more than 95 million respirators per month in the U.S. In addition, 3M has also maximized production of other solutions, including biopharma filtration, hand sanitizers, and disinfectants. Learn more at 3M.com slash COVID. 3M science applied to life.

We are still in the middle of this pandemic, and right now, having science news you can trust from variants to vaccines is essential. NPR Shortwave has your back. About 10 minutes every weekday, listen and subscribe to Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. It's Consider This from NPR. There'll be a conversation going on here between the officials and both head coaches. It was just after 7 p.m. local time at Chesapeake Energy Arena. The Oklahoma City Thunder were about to play the visiting Utah Jazz.

But both teams have gone back to the locker room. But something was holding the game up. The fans here in the arena don't know what's going on. We don't know what's going on. That morning in Washington, D.C., Anthony Fauci had told a congressional committee that the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., which involved a reported 647 confirmed cases at that time, was about to get worse. The flu has a mortality of 0.1 percent. This has a

mortality of 10 times that. And that's the reason why I want to emphasize we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this. Then, just after noon Eastern time, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the virus was spreading at an alarming rate. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic. And in Midwest City, Oklahoma, school was dismissed early.

And I didn't understand because it didn't have snow on the ground And in Midwest City, Oklahoma, school was dismissed early. And I didn't understand because it didn't have snow on the ground and it didn't seem to be a tornado. It wasn't the things that we normally dismiss from that I'm aware of. So Cynthia Gillian, a teacher, decided to catch the basketball game in the city that night. And she didn't realize then that March 11, 2020, would be the day everything changed. NPR's Brianna Scott picks up the story from here. Gillian is a huge Thunder fan. Two years ago, she and her husband announced their wedding anniversary on the Jumbotron at a game in celebration.

So, on March 11, 2020, she and her son were excited to go to the Utah Jazz and Oklahoma City Thunder game that night. We never even made it to our seat. We didn't see if our neighbors were in their seats. The announcement came just before tip-off. Fans, due to unforeseen circumstances, the game tonight has been postponed. You are all safe. I wanted someone to pinch me and tell me, psych, this is not real. I'm just playing. It never happened. It was real. We will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States. More than 100 U.S. colleges have now announced

they are suspending in-person classes. Markets in free fall this morning here in the U.S. The NBA has suspended the season. Tom Hanks revealing he and his wife, actress Rita Wilson, have tested positive for the virus. You're being barraged by all this news and wondering what was going to happen next. Ed Thompson from Connecticut was glued to his phone that day. It was kind of like escalating horrors. Like every day you'd see the case count make a massive jump and, you know, see something crazy in the news, like a potential meat shortage or the oil trade has dried up or something.

It's surreal. Things changed rapidly after that. Thompson says he doesn't even remember his last day in the office before switching to remote work at the software development firm he works at. Stacey Pope felt just how troubling this pandemic would be before the WHO's announcement. She was planning a trip to visit her 98-year-old mother, who stays at a nursing facility in Oregon. When Pope and her husband got to the airport, she says it was a ghost town. We saw a wall of newspapers from all over the place, and each one on the cover in their own way had the stock market, just, just lines showing straight down. And I said to my husband, something terrible is happening.

Maybe this is a mistake that we're going. Things only got worse once they landed in Oregon. They said, your mom has been in quarantine for two weeks. You can't go see her. I don't know what you're doing here. And I remember actually starting to physically shake because I realized that everything was different than what I'd thought. So she knew it was time to head back home to New York. Pope admits it was already a bit weird seeing just a few people in surgical masks at the airport on our way back home. But she says there was this one family that stood out, decked out in gas masks and hazmat suits. And I remember catching the eye of, I think, I guess the father. And he looked at me furtively,

like out of the sight of his goggles. Again, like an untrusted human being nearby. And then they just took off, like jogging toward the baggage claim. She's laughing now. But back then, it was kind of scary. Pope says that her husband and her mom recently got their first doses of the vaccine. A feeling of hope that she says she hasn't felt in over a year. That's NPR's Brianna Scott, also one of the producers on this show. More people every day are feeling that hope that comes with a dose of vaccine. Nearly 25% of the adult population in the U.S. has now had one shot, according to the CDC,

and helping to lead that effort. Just one part of the government's response in the past year are doctors Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. There was a time early on in the pandemic when the two spoke every night on the phone to make sure nothing fell through the cracks. These days... It's not quite every night. It depends a little bit on what's going on.

We may not speak every night, but we definitely speak every day. How about that? Collins heads the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is the chief medical advisor to President Biden. But of course, for most of the last year, both men had a different boss, a president who was criticized for undermining their advice and politicizing public health measures.

And that's had a lasting effect. Today, nearly a third of Republicans tell pollsters they won't get a COVID vaccine. This week, Fauci and Collins spoke to NPR about what they wish they had done differently over the course of the last year and what they're looking forward to next. They spoke with Mary Louise Kelly. I keep thinking what it has been like for you two to be the public face of the fight against a virus that you both were trying to understand in real time. Was there a low point for each of you as this last year played out? Well, the low point for me, Mary Louise,

was the fact that we were trying to deal with a true public health crisis of unprecedented magnitude and impact. And the data were evolving in real time. And as scientists, we put together these guidelines that people had to have an indication that there was a decline in cases before they opened up as it were. We carefully articulated that to the American public. And then unfortunately, soon thereafter, the president said, liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan. And people took that as a signal that they didn't have to pay attention to the carefully crafted guidelines.

That's one concrete example of the frustration that we felt. Yeah, this, Francis, I mean, I think Tony has outlined it very well, the frustration that we all felt. Gosh, we were all working 100 hours a week and many ways still are trying to do everything possible to come up with the solutions for this crisis in terms of therapeutics and vaccines. And yet the simple measures that really should have been instituted much more broadly and adhered to were so difficult to get people to actually appreciate. And that really was one of the hardest parts of this whole sad year. Do you think, though, either of you, that scientists did enough to speak up, to set the facts straight, to make sure that the public messaging was as accurate as you were able to make it? Again, underscoring we were learning about this virus in real time, all of us. I guess you could say we didn't do enough because the message never really completely settled in the way that you would have hoped. And I don't think any of

us quite expected it was going to be that hard. You know, Mary Louise, I think one of the diagnoses that comes out of this last very difficult 12 months is that we seem to be in a society that is so polarized that even objective truth doesn't necessarily have a chance, that is a very disturbing aspect of what we've learned over these 12 months. And if our nation has a path forward to get into a better place, it has to take that on, that we have to be a nation that actually values truth and not just opinions. We didn't do very well with that over this last year. No, not at all. In fact, one of the things that I'm stunned by, this idea that some people don't want to get vaccinated because they actually think that Bill Gates and I have put a chip in the vaccine and we want to control

their thoughts. I mean, I thought that this was just a few people who felt that, but they believe it. And as Francis said, we never, as scientists, would have anticipated that there would be such an egregious distortion of reality. That is very frustrating from a scientific standpoint and becomes extremely problematic when you're trying to implement a public health effort that could be life-saving. And when you don't implement it well, people die. That's serious. Just one last question, which is just the look ahead. You touched on this, but a closing word from both of you on when will this be over? When do things go back to normal? Well, I would imagine that by the time we get into the summer, towards the end of the summer, that if we can get enough people vaccinated and we don't have a considerable degree of vaccine hesitancy, I think we're going to see a gradual return to what we feel

to be normal sometime as we get into the fall, mid fall, late fall, something like that. Again, it's not going to be a light switch that we're going to turn on and off. It's going to be a gradual evolution into normality. Yeah. You know, Mary Louise, this is, after all, one of those circumstances, though, so you don't want to make mistakes, just as we're beginning to see a way forward here. We've been on a marathon since this all started a year ago, and you know, when you're running a marathon, you don't want to stop at the 24th mile. You want to be sure you finish well here. I think that's kind of the picture we have right now, so patience, I hate to say it, is still needed. But I think, give us the summer, the early fall, this is going to be a very different country in a very good way.

And we will all be able to sort of look at that and say, we got through it together. And boy, am I ready for that. Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor to President Biden. And if you want to hear more of their conversation, head over to our episode notes. You'll find the link to that story there. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adi Kornish.

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