Dr. Anthony Fauci will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner due to COVID-19 concerns — an apparent reversal from his stance earlier Wednesday that the United States was “out of the pandemic phase.”
While Fauci has declined to attend the event, seemingly undermining his prior comments, President Joe Biden intends to participate despite a Tuesday announcement that Vice President Kamala Harris contracted COVID-19.
Fauci, who had been invited to the event as a guest of ABC News, according to CNN, will not attend the dinner because of “an individual assessment of his own personal risk,” he stated on Tuesday.
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“We are certainly, right now, in this country, out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci said during an interview that aired Tuesday. “Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
Fauci’s decision may have been affected by a recent Washington superspreader event, as an estimated 72 cases of COVID-19 emerged from the April 2 Gridiron Dinner.
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Fauci has sent mixed messages on COVID-19 in the past, both advocating and cautioning against the use of masks to prevent transmission at various points.
A new strain of COVID-19, known as BA.2 omicron, has risen in the last month and is responsible for the majority of new COVID-19 infections. While COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations have been on the rise since March 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of COVID-19-related deaths has declined significantly.
