Fauci Blames Political Division for Shocking U.S. COVID Deaths on 1-Year Pandemic Anniversary

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations leading infectious disease expert, said Thursday that political division in handling the COVID-19 pandemic is to partly blame for the country's devastating death toll.

Speaking on the one year anniversary that the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Fauci said he believes "divisiveness" and "mixed messages" led to more than 500,000 deaths across the U.S.

"One of the things I keep harkening back to, that you can't run away from, is that we had such divisiveness in our country that even simple common sense public health measures took on a political connotation," he told NBC's Today.

Fauci added that simple measures such as wearing a mask or practicing social distancing became a matter of political affiliation. He also referenced contradicting messages from former President Donald Trump's administration versus public health experts.

"It wasn't a pure public health approach—it was really, very much influenced by the divisiveness we had in this country. And mixed messages were coming from Washington, that's for sure," he added.

Fauci's statement come a full year after WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Later that night, Trump announced the suspension of all travel from Europe to the United States.

Since then, the U.S. has been the worst-hit country, with over 29 million infections and 529,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Early on in the pandemic, Trump often downplayed the virus by insisting it was no more dangerous than the common flu, along with sending mixed messages about the efficacy of masks and lockdown orders.

"I wanted to always play it down," Trump admitted in an interview on March 19 last year. "I still like playing it down, because I don't want to create a panic."

On Thursday, Fauci told NBC that he would have been "completely shocked" to learn this time last year that the U.S. would eventually reach over half a million deaths.

"It would have shocked me completely. I mean, I knew we were in for trouble," Fauci said.

"In fact that day, at a congressional hearing I made the statement, 'Things are going to get much worse before they get better.… ' But I did not in my mind think that 'much worse' was going to be 525,000 deaths," he added.

But the infectious disease expert said Thursday that there is "light at the end of the tunnel," with the number of cases declining and vaccination efforts bumping up across the country.

"Things look good, but we've got to keep putting our foot to the pedal when it comes to public health measures," he warned.

So far, there have been over 95 million vaccine doses administered in the U.S., with over 32 million Americans fully vaccinated against the disease, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

On March 2, President Joe Biden said the country is on track to have enough vaccines for every adult who wants to be inoculated by the end of May.

"My hope is by this time next year, we're going to be back to normal—before that," President Joe Biden told reporters. "It depends upon people continue to be smart and understand that we still have significant losses."

Biden will mark the anniversary of the pandemic in a prime-time address at around 8 o'clock ET this evening.

Newsweek contacted the White House for additional comment, but did not hear back in time for publication.