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

Last week, we began a two-part look at the debate in America over whether it's time to start

thinking about COVID in a new way today. In part two, we put that question to Dr. Anthony Fauci.

It's Monday, January 31st.

So, Dr. Fauci, thank you for making time for us as always. My pleasure, good to be with you.

So, we wanted to talk to you because it feels like we might be at a potential turning point

in how we think about and respond to this pandemic and how we learn to live with it,

rather than having it be a life altering, in some cases, life-dominating virus that people desperately

try to avoid. And a few things prompted that question in our minds, and I want to walk through

them very briefly. The first is that at this point, every person over the age of five in the US

who wants a vaccine can now have one, and most Americans are now vaccinated. Second,

Omacron is hugely contagious, but meaningfully milder than previous variants. So, many people have

accepted that infection is likely in their life. Third, the costs of our current approach

are becoming very high. There's a well-documented crisis of childhood education and childhood

mental health, for example. And fourth, then finally, you yourself said about a week ago

that we're heading into a phase of this pandemic where it resembles, and this is a quote from you,

the infections that we've learned to live with. So, given all that, let me put this to you very

simply. Is it time to perhaps start treating COVID a lot more like the flu? And I didn't pick the

flu by accident because statistically speaking, among vaccinated people, even among people 65 and older,

the Omacron variant of COVID seems to present less danger than a normal flu.

Okay, so everything you said is correct except a very minor, minor misquote of me. I did not say

that we were already at the point. No, no, I said we will, the quote was, we're heading into

...