Watch Dr. Tony Fauci debunk Laura Ingraham’s comparison of HIV treatment to treating coronavirus

Dr. Fauci: “Laura, this is different. HIV/AIDS is entirely different”

Video file

Citation From the April 16, 2020, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle:

LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): On the question of a vaccine, we don't have a vaccine for SARS. I mean, they got close in mice. We don't have a vaccine for HIV, and life did go on, right? So, the idea that we are definitely going to have a vaccine, we didn't really approach much else in the same way as we are pegging going back to normal with a vaccine. Did we?

ANTHONY FAUCI: Well -- no, but Laura, this is different. HIV/AIDS is entirely different. We don't have a vaccine for HIV/AIDS but we have spectacularly effective treatment. People who invariably would have died years ago right now are leading essentially normal lives. SARS is a different story. 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 are going through now with HIV or SARS. They're really different.

INGRAHAM: But we don't know, this could disappear. I mean, SARS did pretty much disappear. This could as well, correct?

FAUCI: Yeah. You know, anything could, Laura, but I have to tell you the degree of efficiency of transmissibility of this is really unprecedented in anything that I've seen. It's an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another. Those kind of viruses don't just disappear.