Name: Fauci tries to clarify his answer to a 'hypothetical question' about 'saved lives'
Uploaded: 2020-04-15T16:56:19.000Z
Duration: 2 min 30 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Basic passive voice

I had until you yesterday that I was asked a hypothetical question on hypothetical questions.

Modal verbs - B1

Sometimes can get you into some difficulty because it's what would have could have.

The third conditional

The nature of the hypothetical question was, if, in fact, we had mitigated earlier, could lives have been saved?

And the answer to my question was, as I always do and I'm doing right now, perfectly honestly say yes.

I mean, obviously, if you mitigation helps.

I've been up here many times telling you that mitigation works.

So if mitigation works and you instigated and you initiated earlier, you will probably have saved more lives.

If you initiated it later, you probably would have lost more lives you initiated at a certain time.

That was taken as a way that maybe somehow something was at fault here.

So let me tell you, from my experience and I could only speak from my own experience is that we have been talking before any meetings that we had about the pros and the cons, the effectiveness or not, of strong mitigations.

So discussions were going on mostly among the medical people about what that would mean the first and only time that Dr Burke's and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a quote shut down in the sense of not really shut down.

But to really have strong mitigation, we discussed it.

Obviously, that would be concerned by some.

In fact, that might have some negative consequences.

Nonetheless, the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation the next second time that I went with Dr Burke's into the president and said, 15 days are not enough.

Obviously, there were people who had a problem with that because of the potential secondary effects.

Nonetheless, at that time, the president went with the health recommendations and we extended it another 30 days, so I could only tell you what I know and what my recommendations were.

 But clearly, as happens all the time, there were interpretations of that response to a hypothetical question that I just thought it would be very nice for me to clarify because they didn't have the chance to clarify. 