On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that “nobody saw” the number of different variants of COVID-19 coming, appearing to contradict recent comments made by Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical advisor to the President.
“So why is the President saying about this new variant, ‘nobody saw it coming, nobody in the world’ if that’s not true?” Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked.
“I would say that nobody saw — knew that there would be the number of different variants,” Psaki said. “Nobody knew exactly how transmissible they would be. We, of course, knew that there would be additional variants at some point coming. We didn’t know what they would look like.”
DOOCY TIME: "So why is the President saying about this new variant, 'nobody saw it coming, nobody in the world' if that's not true."
Psaki: "Well first, I would say that nobody saw — knew that there would be the number of different variants." pic.twitter.com/lnyBawHVFh
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) December 23, 2021
However, Fauci told CNN earlier this week that “we definitely saw variants coming” in response to Vice President Kamala Harris making similar comments about the Delta and Omicron variants.
“We didn’t see Delta coming. I think most scientists did not — upon whose advice and direction we have relied — didn’t see Delta coming,” Harris told the Los Angeles Times. “We didn’t see Omicron coming. And that’s the nature of what this, this awful virus has been, which as it turns out, has mutations and variants.”
In response to Harris’ comments, Fauci said, “We definitely saw variants coming. What was not anticipated was the extent of the mutations in the amino acid substitutions in Omicron, which was really unprecedented.”
