On Thursday, Fox News host Laura Ingraham attempted to make a false comparison between the coronavirus pandemic and AIDS — and Dr. Anthony Fauci promptly shut her down.
“We don’t have a vaccine for SARS, I mean, they got close in mice,” said Ingraham. “We don’t have a vaccine for HIV. And life did go on, right? So the idea that we’re definitely going to have a vaccine — we didn’t really approach much else in the same way, as we’re pegging going back to normal with a vaccine, did we?”
“Well, no, but Laura, this is different,” said Fauci, a key voice on President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force. “HIV/AIDS is entirely different. We don’t have a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, but we have a spectacularly effective treatment. People who invariably would have died years ago, right now are leading essentially normal lives.”
“SARS is a different story,” he added. “SARS disappeared. We developed a vaccine, we were in the process of going through the various phases, we showed it was safe, we showed it induced a good response. And then SARS disappeared. And we didn’t need to develop a vaccine for SARS. So I think it’s a little bit misleading, maybe, to compare what we’re going through now with HIV or SARS.”
Watch the interview:
