Anthony Fauci on Monday sought to squash any notion of a fissure between himself and President Trump, saying at the opening of a coronavirus task force briefing that the president repeatedly and immediately backed social distancing recommendations from Fauci and other public health officials despite the economic pain.
“The first and only time that I went in and said we should do mitigation strongly, the response was, ‘yes, we’ll do it,’” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters in the White House briefing room on Monday evening.
Fauci, a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, was seeking to clarify remarks he made a day prior in an interview with CNN when he said that more lives could have been saved if the federal government had moved forward with social distancing guidelines directing Americans to avoid public places and travel earlier than mid-March. Continue reading.