US President Donald Trump calls the statement on his alleged slow response to the coronavirus outbreak from Dr. Anthony Fauci "fake news."
It all started when Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, said on "State of the Union" on Sunday that earlier implementation of mitigation policies could have made a difference.
“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives,” Dr. Fauci said on CNN.
“Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. 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.”
However, Trump hinted that he disagreed to the statement made by Fauci, calling his slow response to the spread of COVID-19 fake news.
The president reposted a Tweet from a former Republican congressional candidate: “Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives,” said the tweet by DeAnna Lorraine.
“Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to #Fire Fauci.”
Trump's accompanying message to the Tweet is: “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up.”
Trump is reportedly irritated with Dr. Fauci but the Twitter post appeared to be the most explicit expression of his irritation.
The Tweet emerged while Trump was posting messages that defend how he handled the coronavirus crisis and blame China, the World Health Organization (WHO), President Barack Obama, Democrats, governors, and the media.
One of his Tweets was: “If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat,’ then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China?” he wrote. “They said ‘early & not necessary.’ Corrupt Media!”
While Trump did not explicitly “ban China,” he made an order to not allow foreign nationals who had been in China in the past 14 days to enter into the US starting on February 2.
However, despite the policy, 40,000 Americans and other authorized travelers were able to enter the country from China since then.
Dr. Fauci and other health officials were not optimistic that the China travel ban would be useful when the president was first pondering them, but then eventually supported them.
What critics are claiming is that Trump's administration did not then implement widespread testing and social distancing policies before infections could spread exponentially.
Only during the third week of February did the advisers draft a list of measures they deemed important, like closure of schools, cancellations of sports and concerts, and stay-at-home orders. The president reportedly acknowledged them mid-March.
Public health experts like Dr. Fauci made a warning about returning back to normalcy due the fear of starting another wave of illness and death. However, the president’s economic advisers already want to restart businesses.
Dr. Fauci and the president reportedly disagreed on several issues, such as the timeframe of vaccine development and Trump's promotion of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effects remain unproven.
Polls suggest that the public trusts Dr. Fauci than Trump, with 78 percent of respondents approved of Dr. Fauci’s management of the crisis.
Another Tweet posted by Trump on Sunday read: “Congress was too distracted by the (phony) Impeachment Witch Hunt when they should have been investigating CoronaVirus when it first appeared in China.”
He also blamed states for not being prepared: “Governors, get your states testing programs & apparatus perfected,” he wrote. “Be ready, big things are happening. No excuses!”
Moreover, the president retweeted a message saying that the WHO “enabled China’s obfuscation on coronavirus, and that it could have been containable had Beijing not lied to the world.”
