He wonders if there was anything he missed in China's lies that might've tipped him off that this was far worse than they were letting on. And that's a honest person.
I agree. Dr. Fauci actually took a lot of it on himself, and I think there’s an underlying point about “your worst nightmare”, as Dr. Fauci put it. Most normal people tend to discount “their worst nightmare” (or nightmares), even when there are indications such may be on the horizon. Such expectation is not a very efficient way to live one’s life, 99% of the time, in our modern world, and I suspect that for most of the population it’s not even very mentally healthy, individually or as a society. (I am not dissing here people in tornado country who make sure they have a basement or storm cellar and some supplies, and so on. And even extreme preppers - if that makes one more comfortable with life, that’s fine for them, too. It just doesn’t work well for most people in a typical lifetime.)
Plus, Dr. Fauci is, after all, an old guy bureaucrat who’s probably a conscientious public servant, but he hasn’t actually experienced anything as “stealthy” as COVID-19. So, like many others (including quite a few flu bros here on FR), there may be a sort of unconscious bias - normalcy bias, if you will, at play, that can delay proper analysis of the situation. Wild sounding reports coming out of Wuhan on social media, well, those aren’t scientifically documentable, and get discounted...* Ditto for Redfield over at CDC, and so on. Dr. Fauci said it himself: “Worse than you (himself) could have imagined.”
*I must admit that I am a bit mystified as to where US intelligence resources in China were? Asleep at the wheel? Even if every biolab in China is 100% dedicated to nothing but public health and we & China are best buds, simple prudence would dictate keeping an eye on them and especially any outbreaks in China, merely based on the past recent history of nasties arising in China.
The REAL problem here (NIH, NIAID, CDC) is the system, which unfortunately is typical of that in many countries.
In any event, I think Dr. Fauci really stepped up to the plate both at the beginning and the end of the presser.