From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is Adali.

On yesterday's show, we explored the profound challenges facing local public health

officials as they tried to fight COVID-19. Today, we speak with the nation's leading

public health official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, about how he sees this moment, both for the

pandemic and his profession. It's Friday, November 12th.

Dr. Fauci, hey, it's Michael Bavaro. I'm good, Michael. Hold on, you just blew me out

of my seat. Oh, I'm sorry. No, that's not your fault. I turned it down. All right, we're

going to go ahead. Michael, say a few more words to see if it's good. Okay, a few more

words, Dr. Fauci. How's the volume? The volume's good now. Okay. Yeah. Well, you're not

being thrown back in your seat. So that's good sign. Right. Okay. Good. Thanks. Well, thank

you for making time for us. My pleasure. Dr. Fauci, it's very useful when we talk about

COVID-19 to orient ourselves in where we are. So just to start things in the simplest terms

of time, where are we right now in this pandemic in the US? What words would you use to describe

that? Well, probably it would be a mixed bag leaning towards the positive as opposed to

the negative. Why towards the positive? Well, because we have had a major surge that we

have peaked and are starting to come down positive. Positive is that we have a vaccine implementation

program that has done generally quite well, though I'd be happy to get into more details

about why it is not exactly where I would like to see it.

Number three, we have now approval for vaccines for children, which are an important component

of all of this. We've shown that boosters are safe and effective in dramatically increasing

the response, not only immunologically, but also when you look at the clinical data from

Israel, it's very clear that it reverses some of the waning effect that you see in people

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