In a conversation with the PBS NewsHour host, the president's chief medical adviser discusses recent data on the pandemic and the future of variants.

At the beginning of the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are many things that public health officials know about the virus that they didn’t know before: how it spreads, for one, and how effective vaccines are against many of the current variants. But there is still much that is unknown. 

After a difficult winter dealing with the highly transmissible omicron variant, Americans are heading into another pandemic summer not knowing what new variants are around the corner and, ultimately, when the pandemic will shift into an endemic phase.

As the chief medical adviser to the president and the face of the federal pandemic response, Dr. Anthony Fauci holds the unenviable role of guiding a politically fractured nation through this uncertainty.

For this episode of the Crosscut Talks podcast, we are featuring the full interview between Fauci and PBS Newshour host Judy Woodruff, which took place on April 26, 2022, as part of the Crosscut Festival. In this conversation, Fauci discusses the possibility of new variants, the emergence of new therapies and the political divide that has been a defining aspect of the fight against the virus.

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Credits

Host: Mark Baumgarten

Producer: Sara Bernard

Event producers: Jake Newman, Andrea O'Meara

Engineers: Resti Bagcal, Viktoria Ralph