Media’s new fake news: Fauci attacked Trump, will be fired
If you watch the big media outlets and CNN, you’d be led to believe that Dr. Fauci took aim at President Trump, his response to the pandemic and will now be fired by Trump due to a retweet — none of this is true.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, shut down rumors on Monday that he was criticizing President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic during a CNN interview Sunday.
photo/ donkeyhotey
“I had an interview yesterday that I was asked a hypothetical question and hypothetical questions sometimes can get you into some difficulty because it’s what would have or could have,” Fauci said. “The nature of the hypothetical question was if, in fact, we had mitigated earlier, could lives have been saved?
And the answer to my question was, as I always do, and am doing right now, perfectly honestly say, yes.”
“I mean, obviously mitigation helps,” Fauci continued. “I’ve been up here many times telling you that mitigation works. So if mitigation works and you instigate its, and you initiate it earlier, you will probably save more lives. If you initiated it to later, you will probably lose more lives. You initiate it at a certain time. That was taken as a way that may be somehow something was at fault here.”
“Let me tell you from my experience, and I can only speak for my own experience, is that we have been talking before any meetings that we had about the pros and the cons, the effectiveness or not of strong mitigations,” Fauci continued. “So discussions were going on, mostly among the medical people about what that would mean. The first and only time that Dr. Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a ‘shutdown’ … we discussed it. Obviously there would be concerns by some, and in fact, that might have some negative consequence. Nonetheless, the president listened to the recommendation. And went to the mitigation.”
Fauci later slammed left-wing CBS News reporter Paula Reid for suggesting that he was being forced to make the statement.
“Everything I do is voluntarily,” Fauci fired back. “Please. Don’t even imply that.”
CNN host Jake Tapper ask on Suday why the president didn’t accept the earlier recommendations, Fauci said, “You know, Jake, as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes it’s not. But we – it is what it is. We are where we are right now.”
Tapper asked Fauci if lives could have been saved if stay-at-home orders had begun earlier.
“Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“But you’re right, I mean, obviously, if we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then,” he said.
On Sunday, Trump had retweeted a message that included the words, “time to #FireFauci.”
The White House on Monday shot down speculation that Trump may move to fire Fauci.
“This media chatter is ridiculous – President Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
photo/ Gordon Johnson
