Fauci says 400 US deaths a day is 'not an acceptable number' despite President Biden declaring the pandemic 'over'

Dr. Anthony Fauci is adding a critical footnote to Biden's "pandemic is over" comment. Declaring the pandemic over is a "double-edged sword," he said.

• Days after President Biden said "the pandemic is over," his chief medical advisor is adding context.
• "400 deaths per day is not an acceptable number," Fauci told The Atlantic.
• He said now is not the time to call the game and go get a hot dog.

President Biden declared "the pandemic is over" on Sunday night TV, a remark that immediately sparked many dubious headlines.  

But his top medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, wants you to know that little "seven-second sound bite" doesn't really mean there is no more work to be done fighting COVID. 

"400 deaths per day is not an acceptable number as far as I'm concerned, we've gotta get it down much, much lower," Fauci told The Atlantic's Ross Andersen on Wednesday. 

Addressing what he called the "question du jour" about whether the pandemic is really over or not, Fauci explained how "if you look at his entire quote, it's not incompatible with what I had said." 

Fauci, who came under fire for saying something similar in the spring, said "it really becomes semantics, and about how you wanna spin it."

"The next sentence he went on, and said that we still have a lot of work to do, because we're really not over with COVID," Fauci said of Biden's remarks.

This is not the time to call the game and get a hot dog, Fauci said

Declaring the pandemic over is now a "double-edged sword," Fauci added. 

It's not wrong to admit that things are better overall than they were six months ago, or a year ago, but life isn't what it once was, and there's still too much avoidable suffering going on due to the virus. 

"On the one hand, you do want to have the public to have a sense, so that they continue their energy of what the end game is and what the finish line is," Fauci said.

On the other hand, he says this is not the time to call the game, and go get a "hot dog," assuming we'll never encounter another "outta-left-field-variant."

"We wanna see the finish line — at the same time — we're gonna push as hard as we can to get people vaccinated and boosted," he said. "We still should have hope that we're going in the right direction."