Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his departure from the federal government last month after 55 years of public service.

His departure follows a declaration from the CDC that the agency will undergo an internal overhaul.

In this episode of Morning Wire, we look back on America's response to the pandemic, where we went wrong, and what the CDC says it's going to do to shore up public confidence.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley. It's September 4th, and this is your Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

Here to discuss is Johns Hopkins, Dr. Marty McCarry. Dr. McCarry, thanks so much for joining us.

Great to be with you, Georgia.

Now, last month, we learned that Dr. Fauci is stepping down from his role in government.

Then a few days later, you put out a pretty powerful piece for common sense news about the lessons we learned from Fauci's tenure that hopefully will help us navigate the next pandemic more effectively.

What's one major takeaway that you'd like the medical community to learn from the Fauci years?

I think a lot of physicians wish there was more of an open dialogue, where we could have had different opinions in a civil fashion represented.

It's how we've been doing science for centuries, and it's very productive, and it's part of the scientific method.

I think people felt a little bit like Dr. Fauci, with all of his positive traits and characteristics, was really dominating the dialogue, and the policy was really shaped around his opinion, which is not necessarily always wrong or bad, or malintended.

It's just not one that many of us agreed with, especially when it came to school closures, recognizing natural immunity, and warning of the pandemic before it actually hit this country.

Now, you have been a strong proponent of natural immunity. Now that we have more than two years worth of data, what do we know about natural immunity and its effectiveness as compared to the vaccine?

Well, it's interesting because the data are now in. We've had ample time to study it, and natural immunity is clearly more powerful, more effective, better, and more durable than vaccinated immunity.

The reason many public health officials have been afraid to talk about it is that they were worried that people would take the risk and try to acquire COVID in order to get natural immunity.

We didn't want anyone to do that, especially when we had a very effective vaccine in the first year, the vaccines for that strain that was circulating.

And so the data are now in, natural immunity is superior, but public health officials have defaulted to, well, might as well get both anyway.

Now, you've also written about the approach that we took in this country with children. How did the United States differ from, say, Europe in our approach with kids? And what can we learn going forward?

There was really an incredible myopic focus by public health officials to block all virus transmission among children at any cost.

And so it was very clear at some point that not only was shutting kids out of school, having a mental health epidemic ignited as a part of that closure, but also it just didn't seem right. There was, there's a lifelong learning loss now that we're dealing with with many children.

Your schools in Europe were open free and clear beyond the initial few weeks or months. They were open free and clear and without masks. And so now there's been ample time to study schools that were open with masks and without in the United States and overseas.

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