Tag: Dr. Fauci

We asked right-wing flack Michael Caputo why he’s in charge of Dr. Fauci’s schedule. His response: ‘What’s with the attitude?’

AlterNet logoLast week the Washington Post published a report titled “Fauci is sidelined by the White House as he steps up blunt talk on pandemic,” which revealed that President Trump had not sought the counsel of the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, in more than a month.

But as the Trump administration has strayed from the advice of many of its scientists and public health experts, the White House has moved to sideline Fauci, scuttled some of his planned TV appearances and largely kept him out of the Oval Office for more than a month even as coronavirus infections surge in large swaths of the country.

The 2,500-word report only briefly touches on the official who does that scuttling: a man named Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign aide who has been described as a conspiracy theorist with racist views and is closely allied with former Trump adviser Roger Stone. Continue reading.

Trump’s gripes about Fauci: A guide

Washington Post logoOver and over, the president has the same three complaints about Anthony S. Fauci, the renowned director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The three items of dispute all appeared in the Chris Wallace interview, but they have popped up in various interviews since April.

As one would expect, Trump’s memory is faulty. Here’s a guide to his gripes.

‘Dr. Fauci at the beginning said, “This will pass.” ’

Trump often projects his insecurities, and one of his biggest political problems now is that many Americans believe he did not take the emergence of the coronavirus seriously. For weeks in January, February and half of March, Trump played down the threat of the new virus, insisting it would disappear on its own.

Dr. Deborah Birx seemed like a reasonable voice close to the throne. Now she’s destroyed herself — and for what?

AlterNet logoOver the past week or so, there’s been a major attempt by the Trump administration to demean the reputation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, with anonymous “oppo-research” and open insults from Peter Navarro, a trade adviser close to President Trump. Fauci is widely acknowledged to be one of the world’s foremost experts on pandemics so there was a furious pushback to this crude character assassination. Despite the fact that Trump had made similar remarks about Fauci being “wrong” about the coronavirus, the president was forced to throw Navarro under the bus despite the fact that it’s obvious they’ve been on the same page.

Trump is obviously jealous of the public’s trust in Fauci, compared to the increasing public skepticism of anything he personally says about the crisis. But this attack on Fauci is really just a symbol of the administration’s rejection of the reality we can see with our own eyes: a new explosion of COVID-19 all over the country.

It was an ugly kerfuffle but certainly not something that should have surprised us. Trump has been insulting and purging any government employee he deems disloyal, and since Fauci isn’t blowing smoke about the virus, that’s how Trump sees him. Continue reading.

USA Today, facing backlash, says Navarro opinion piece attacking Fauci does not meet its standards

Washington Post logoFacing intense criticism on social media, USA Today has admitted errors in an opinion piece written by a White House official that attacked Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious-disease expert, saying in a post-publication note attached to the piece that it “did not meet USA TODAY’s fact-checking standards.”

Published online Tuesday evening and in print Wednesday, the opinion piece was authored by Peter Navarro, who heads the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and was paired with the provocative headline: “Anthony Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.”

On Wednesday evening, editorial page editor Bill Sternberg added a note that explained the piece’s origins as well as its mistakes. Continue reading.

Vice President Pence defends Fauci as White House sends mixed messages on health expert

WASHINGTON – Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday defended Dr. Anthony Fauci in public comments made soon after he tweeted out a photo of the two of them at the White House.

“Dr. Fauci is a valued member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force,” Pence said on a campaign call with reporters when asked about recent attacks on Fauci by others in the administration. “We just completed our latest meeting today and we couldn’t be more grateful for his steady counsel.”

The photo he tweeted showed Fauci sitting at Pence’s right hand during the meeting. Continue reading.

Trump Officials Are Attacking Anthony Fauci. Thousands Of Doctors Are Hitting Back.

“You cannot have a competent public health response without a clear communication strategy,” one top medical expert said of the White House’s moves against Fauci. “This isn’t it.”

More than 1,000 health officials came to the aid of Dr. Anthony Fauci after a White House official published an op-ed trying to discredit the nation’s top health expert who has helped steer the country through the coronavirus pandemic so far.

Peter Navarro, an assistant to the president and a director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, wrote an op-ed in USA Today criticizing Fauci. The op-ed said Fauci has “been wrong on everything” that Navarro has interacted with him on.

Thousands of doctors are now ridiculing Navarro’s claims and responding with a broad defense of Fauci, who has led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. Continue reading.

Navarro-Fauci battle intensifies, to detriment of Trump

The Hill logoWhite House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s battle with Anthony Fauciintensified on Wednesday, putting the White House in a difficult position as it struggles to downplay evidence of a rift between President Trump and one of the nation’s most trusted health experts. 

In an extraordinary move, Navarro wrote an op-ed in USA Today, the country’s largest newspaper, cataloging his disagreements with Fauci and questioning his credibility, saying the top U.S. infectious disease official’s advice should be taken with “skepticism and caution.”

The Trump White House has since its infancy been characterized by infighting, and Trump has welcomed disagreements among his aides. But Navarro’s effort to take his fight against Fauci public is unusual. Continue reading.

Navarro under fire over anti-Fauci op-ed

The White House trade adviser’s column represented his most brazen effort yet to dress down the widely respected immunologist.

President Donald Trump’s top trade adviser came under fire Wednesday for assailing Dr. Anthony Fauci in a new op-ed, with even the White House distancing itself from the diatribe after waging its own smear campaign against the nation’s top infectious disease expert over the weekend.

Alyssa Farah, White House director of strategic communications, insisted in a tweet Wednesday morning that the West Wing’s press shop had not approved the explosive column by Peter Navarro, director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, that appeared Tuesday evening on USA Today’s website.

“The Peter Navarro op-ed didn’t go through normal White House clearance processes and is the opinion of Peter alone,” Farah wrote online. “@realDonaldTrump values the expertise of the medical professionals advising his Administration.” Continue reading.

Live updates: ‘Let’s stop this nonsense,’ Fauci says of federal coronavirus response as he comes under fire

NOTE:  This article is provided free of charge by The Washington Post.
Washington Post logoSidelined by the White House and harshly criticized in an extraordinary op-ed from a top adviser to the Trump administration, Anthony S. Fauci — the nation’s top infectious-disease expert — said in an interview with the Atlantic published Wednesday that the country needs to focus on a surging virus “rather than these games people are playing.”

“We’ve got to almost reset this and say, ‘Okay, let’s stop this nonsense,’ ” he said after being asked to state “the truth about the federal response to the pandemic” in the United States. “We’ve got to figure out, How can we get our control over this now, and, looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona?”

Meanwhile, support for mask mandates continued to grow a day after another of the country’s top health officials said universal face-covering could bring covid-19 “under control” in the United States. In Alabama, Kay Ivey (R) became the latest governor to change their tune after initial resistance and issue a statewide mask order, while Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, said it would require all shoppers to wear face masks.

Fauci Back at the White House, a Day After Trump Aides Tried to Undermine Him

New York Times logoThe visit underscored a reality for both the president and his most prominent coronavirus adviser: They are stuck with each other.

WASHINGTON — A day after President Trump’s press office tried to undermine the reputation of the nation’s top infectious disease expert with an anonymously attributed list of what it said were his misjudgments in the early days of the coronavirus, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci returned to the White House on Monday.

The visit underscored a reality for both men: They are stuck with each other.

Dr. Fauci — who has not had direct contact with the president in more than five weeks even as the number of Americans with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has risen sharply in the Southwest — slipped back into the West Wing to meet with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, while his allies denounced what they called a meanspirited and misguided effort by the White House to smear him. Continue reading.