Tag: Anthony Fauci

Fauci says task force ‘argued strongly’ with Trump to extend coronavirus guidelines

The Hill logoDr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said Monday that the White House coronavirus task force aggressively lobbied President Trump to extend social distancing guidelines another month as the U.S. grapples with the fallout of the novel coronavirus pandemic. 

“We felt that if we prematurely pulled back, we would only form an acceleration or rebound of something, which would put you behind where you were before, and that’s a reason why we argued strongly with the president that he not withdraw those guidelines,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN’s “New Day.”

“And he did listen,” Fauci added. Continue reading.

Right-Wing Media Intensify Attacks On Dr. Fauci

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the past 36 years, is a widely respected immunologist and major public face of the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19. Despite his credibility established over decades as a public health official, right-wing media have begun to launch attacks against “Dr. Doom Fauci,” blaming the medical expert for allegedly harming the economy and undermining President Donald Trump. The New York Times reported that Trump is “losing his patience” with Fauci.

Despite lacking the platform of someone like Fox host Sean Hannity, fringe right-wing media figures and outlets — one of which formerly had a White House correspondent in the briefing room just to troll journalists — can still reach and influence the thinking of Trump, who is exposed to a wide range of ridiculous lies online.

Pro-Trump podcaster Bill Mitchell: Continue reading.

Fauci says Trump’s Easter goal for lifting coronavirus restrictions should be ‘flexible’

The Hill logoDr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday said President Trump’s stated timeline for the lifting of restrictions on parts of the country by Easter Sunday should be “flexible.”

Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a prominent member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, added it is important for public health officials to gauge how widespread coronavirus is in parts of the country that haven’t reported significant numbers of cases.

“That’s really very flexible,” Fauci told reporters at the White House when asked about the president’s timeline, which Trump floated earlier Tuesday during a Fox News virtual town hall on the coronavirus pandemic.  Continue reading.

Trump Has Given Unusual Leeway to Fauci, but Aides Say He’s Losing His Patience

New York Times logoThe president has become increasingly concerned as Dr. Anthony S. Fauci has grown bolder in correcting his falsehoods about the spread of the coronavirus.

President Trump has praised Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as a “major television star.” He has tried to demonstrate that the administration is giving him free rein to speak. And he has deferred to Dr. Fauci’s opinion several times at the coronavirus task force’s televised briefings.

But Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, has grown bolder in correcting the president’s falsehoods and overly rosy statements about the spread of the coronavirus in the past two weeks — and he has become a hero to the president’s critics because of it. And now, Mr. Trump’s patience has started to wear thin.

So has the patience of some White House advisers, who see Dr. Fauci as taking shots at the president in some of his interviews with print reporters while offering extensive praise for Mr. Trump in television interviews with conservative hosts. Continue reading.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it’: Sanjay Gupta stunned after Dr. Fauci is forced to fact-check Trump

AlterNet logoCNN’s Sanjay Gupta found himself shocked after watching President Donald Trump try to correct Dr. Anthony Fauci about potential coronavirus treatments.

Shortly after the president’s press conference ended, CNN host John King highlighted Fauci shooting down the idea of using an antimalarial drug to treat the virus.

The information that you’re referring to [regarding the drug] is anecdotal,” Fauci said. “It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.” Continue reading.

Why Trump’s Top Three Coronavirus Strategies Will Fail

Even as President Donald Trump continues to insist that he’s done a superb job handling the coronavirus crisis, the evidence of his extreme failures abound. In a hearing before Congress on Thursday, a top official in the administration’s response contradicted Trump about the government’s testing capabilities and acknowledged the shortfall as an important “failing.”

And the same official, Dr. Anthony Fauci, warned the previous day about the outbreak: “It’s going to get worse.”

While Fauci was speaking as an expert in infectious disease, economists — and anyone glancing at the stock market — fear that the risk of financial fallout from the pandemic is equally dim. Continue reading.

Hearing on coronavirus ends abruptly as White House tells experts to come to ’emergency meeting’

AlterNet logoOn Wednesday morning, medical experts, including National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, were testifying before the House Oversight Committee on what to expect from the coronavirus epidemic in the United States. According to Fauci, “The bottom line: It is going to get worse.” Again and again, the information provided in the hearing completely contradicted the rosy statements that have been coming from Donald Trump and other White House officials and warned of a dire situation ahead.

But before the House could learn too many details, the hearing ended in an abrupt and astounding manner, as the witnesses simply got up and left. At 11:30 ET, Oversight Committee Chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney was told that the witnesses had to depart. In an attempt to explain what was happening, Fauci said they were going to an “emergency meeting” at the White House. Then, to add extra confusion, the White House immediately claimed that the meeting was not an emergency … it was just something that Fauci and Redfield didn’t know about and that was so urgent that they had to leave in the middle of congressional testimony.

On Tuesday, Trump appeared before the nation and assured everyone, “It will go away, just stay calm.” But before his testimony was cut off, Dr. Fauci made a number of statements that were exactly counter to everything that Trump, Mike Pence, and the whole galaxy of Fox News surrogates have been trying to pass off on the nation. Continue reading.

Trump coronavirus effort undermined by mixed messages and falsehoods

Washington Post logoWhen Anthony Fauci, clad in a white lab coat, invited an “NBC Nightly News” correspondent into his offices this week and described the coronavirus as an “outbreak” that was reaching “likely pandemic proportions,” the immunologist was acting as he long has during public health crises: delivering a fact-based warning to the public.

But at the White House, the more politically minded officials overseeing the administration’s response were irritated that Fauci — the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — had used the word “pandemic” without giving anyone on Vice President Pence’s staff a heads-up, according to two people familiar with the situation.

One week after Trump returned home from India to confront an unfolding health crisis and tasked Pence with managing the government-wide response, the effort has been undermined by mixed messages, contradictions and falsehoods — many of them emanating from the president himself, including this week when he repeatedly spread false information about just how soon a coronavirus vaccine would be available. Continue reading.

‘You don’t want to go to war with a president’

How Dr. Anthony Fauci is navigating the coronavirus outbreak in the Trump era.

Anthony Fauci might be the one person everyone in Washington trusts right now.

But at 79, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is in the thick of one of the biggest battles of 35 years in the role: The race to contain coronavirus when the nation is deeply polarized and misinformation can spread with one tweet — sometimes, from the president himself.

“You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don’t want to go to war with a president,” Fauci, who has been the country’s top infectious diseases expert through a dozen outbreaks and six presidents, told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.” Continue reading.