National infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said Saturday younger people, who statistically don’t get as sick with COVID-19 as the elderly, are “propagating a pandemic” by flouting public health guidelines.
In an interview with WebMd, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said “clearly young people are driving this new surge.”
“If you go back and look at the demography of the new infections, the age group is at least 15 years younger than what we were seeing a few months ago when things were surging in New York when they got hit very badly,” he said.
“So what happens is that younger individuals who generally, statistically, are not going to have symptoms to the frequency that elderly people do," he continued.
“They're not going to get very sick. They know that. So what I think is happening is that, understandably, innocently, but not correctly, the younger individuals are saying, ‘well, if I get infected, so the chances of it is that I won't even have any symptoms, so who cares?’"
But that's "a big mistake," he pointed out.
“Because by allowing yourself to getting infected or not caring if you do get infected, you are propagating a pandemic," he said.
“Because it doesn't end with you. You get infected and have no symptoms. The chances are you're going to infect someone else, who will then infect someone else. And then someone who's vulnerable to severe consequences will get infected.”
Fauci noted ignoring the consequences of infecting someone else underscores that infected people, even if they don’t show symptoms, are “not operating in a vacuum.”
“You're part of the problem as opposed to being part of the solution,” he said. “So somehow, we've got to keep getting that message across. And I don't mean in the sense of blaming anybody. Because these are people that are doing this innocently and inadvertently.”
Fauci emphases the coronavirus “is a very formidable foe here.”
“And the only way we're going to get our arms around it is by doing the things that we know work,” he said.
“And we do know that avoiding physical contact, putting masks on, not going to crowds, closing the bars, that's the answer. It really is. So we can do it. There's nothing about this that we can't do to turn it around.”
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.