Leon Panetta taps an old friend and man of the moment, Dr. Anthony Fauci, to talk Covid-19.

Former congressman, CIA director and White House chief of staff Leon Panetta has a lot of friends in high places to draw from in putting together the Panetta Institute for Public Policy’s annual lecture series. Since 1997, Panetta, his wife Sylvia and staff have pulled together politicians from both sides of the aisle, Supreme Court justices, journalists and world-renowned experts.

This year Panetta secured the pandemic’s ultimate speaker “get” – Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – to kick off the 2021 series, “New Leadership in a New Decade.” Fauci is more than a Covid expert, he’s friends with Panetta. Through cameras over Zoom, with Panetta at the Monterey Conference Center and Fauci 3,000 miles away, the two chatted on Feb. 22.

Panetta called Fauci an expert, friend “and yes, a fellow Italian.” Here are some highlights of their conversation. More excerpts are captured at twitter.com/pammarino.

On the war against Covid:

Panetta: Have we truly turned the corner? How confident are you we can win this war? This year?

Fauci: I’m confident we can win the war but we’ve had major battles. Things look good because we have vaccines rolling out. But the variants are troublesome.

On pandemic missteps:

Panetta: You warned the country about the pathogens that could cause a pandemic. Why wasn’t the U.S. better prepared?

Fauci: That’s complicated. There were missteps early on… First misstep: lack of transparency about the nature of the virus coming from China. The first big misstep was that tests developed by the CDC didn’t work very well. We lost time. Then we had a disparate response among states. Instead of uniformly responding, some states did well, some did not.

Panetta: What did other countries do right that we missed?

Fauci: When South Korea and Australia said we’re going to shut down, they shut down. When we said we were shutting down, there was still a lot of activity. I adore the independent spirit in this country, but that doesn’t work well when fighting a common enemy like a virus. Other countries did it much better than we did.

On vaccines:

Panetta, reading an audience question: President Biden says 300 million doses by July 2021. Do you agree we can achieve that goal?

Fauci: He means 600 million doses, and I totally agree that by July we’ll have enough vaccines to vaccinate everyone in the country. [Biden announced on March 2 that timeframe will be May, not July.]

Panetta: With all of the research that’s gone into Covid, could we develop a universal [coronavirus] vaccine?

Fauci: You took a page out of my playbook, Leon! Yes, we’re working on it. It behooves us to come up with a universal vaccine.

And a note of appreciation:

Panetta, after calling Fauci a great example to the country for his dedication and honesty: I want to pay tribute to you not just for being a good Italian, but for being a good human being… buona fortuna!