Fauci says pushback against 'easy-to-understand' COVID-19 protection measures like mask-wearing and vaccination is 'very disturbing'

• Pushback against public health measures to curb COVID-19 is "very disturbing", Dr. Anthony Fauci said.
• He told a World Economic Forum meeting we'd be "better off" if we "pulled together as a society."

Dr. Anthony Fauci has described as "very disturbing" the pushback against "normal, easy-to-understand" COVID-19 public health measures like vaccination and mask-wearing.

Fauci, President Biden's chief medical advisor, said Monday: "If we all pulled together as a society, we would be much, much better off."

In a virtual session of the World Economic Forum, Fauci said: "It's very disturbing, I believe to all of us as public health officials and scientists, such a degree of pushback against regular, normal, easy-to-understand public health measures. Reluctance to wear masks, reluctance to promote vaccination, reluctance to do kinds of public health measures."

He continued: "You make the virus have an advantage when you don't implement, in a unified way, all the very well-recognised public health measures — particularly the vaccines."

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, added: "Even for a rich country like the United States, that supposedly was the best-prepared country for a pandemic, we are among a handful of the countries that have actually suffered the most. When you look now at the 65 million cases and the close to 900,000 deaths in our country, that is really, truly unfortunate, and something that we would have hoped would have been avoided."

The highly infectious Omicron variant of the coronavirus has a large number of mutations in the part of the virus that infects human cells. It tends to cause a milder illness than the formerly-dominant Delta variant but can still make people sick.

In the US, where the majority of new reported cases are caused by Omicron, 151,000 people were in hospital with COVID-19 as of Friday, more than twice the number recorded a month before, Oxford University's Our World in Data showed.