(The Hill) — Anthony Fauci had an unlikely companion cheering him on as he received his COVID-19 booster, promoting getting the shots during an appearance alongside Stephen Colbert on “The Late Show.”
“I’m actually eligible to get a booster,” Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told Colbert during a Wednesday interview.
After Colbert offered to go to a drug store down the street to help Fauci get his booster, the two headed out together as part of a taped sketch.
After being cajoled by Colbert to sport a pair of Halloween cat ears and then sunglasses to encourage Americans to get their booster shots, Fauci, 81, sat down for his vaccine.
“Are you nervous to give this man a shot?” the CBS host asked the pharmacist administering Fauci’s booster.
“He’s actually only the third most famous I’ve vaccinated,” the pharmacist quipped.
After getting his shot, Fauci said, “I’m good.”
Colbert presented Fauci with an oversized lollipop.
“Anthony Fauci: fully inoculated and boosted,” Colbert declared.
It’s not the first time Fauci has been vaccinated on camera. In 2020, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director publicly received the Moderna coronavirus vaccine.
In an interview before getting his shot, Colbert praised Fauci as an official “whose level-headed guidance has taken us through the pandemic.”
Fauci addressed President Joe Biden’s comment during a “60 Minutes” interview last month in which the commander-in-chief said that the “pandemic is over.”
After Colbert said the pandemic didn’t “feel over,” Fauci replied, “It’ll feel over in a real sense when it gets to such a low level in society that it doesn’t disrupt the social order.”
“What the president was referring to is that the very acute stage of the outbreak, where we were getting 900,000 cases a day and [3,000] to 4,000 deaths, that’s not where we are right now. We’re way down in cases, but we’re also way down in deaths,” Fauci said.
“But the level that we’re at, Stephen, is not really acceptable. I don’t feel comfortable at all saying we can live with 400 deaths a day,” Fauci said.
“We have got to get the level of infection and the level of deaths and hospitalizations far, far lower. So it’s not eradicated — we’re not going to completely get rid of this — but we want to get it to a level that’s so low that it just doesn’t disrupt society,” he said.