As Americans begin to prepare for the upcoming holiday season, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s leading expert on infectious diseases, warns the public “could not possibly be positioned more poorly” in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. Fauci alerts that cases soon may reach more than 100,000 in a single day, he tells The Washington Post in an interview published Saturday.
What We Know:
- As President Trump continues to tour the country, hosting large, crowded rallies in various cities amid a pandemic, Dr. Fauci warns that this winter season will bring a record-breaking volume of coronavirus cases within the US. President Trump has consistently spoken against Dr. Fauci, despite his positions as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leader in the administration’s coronavirus task force.
- In the Washington Post interview, Fauci condemns the President’s decision to be advised by Dr. Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist, who suggests that the country reopen without sanitary restrictions and supports allows the virus to be transmitted amongst young individuals. He also criticizes the Trump administration for focusing solely on the country’s reopening despite the large spikes in Covid cases, while simultaneously lauding the Biden campaign for “taking [Covid] seriously from a public health perspective”. He also reveals that the administration has excluded him and the coronavirus task force coordinator, Deborah Birx, from accessing the President and that he has not spoken with the President since he was hospitalized at Walter Reed hospital after testing positive for coronavirus.
- Following the publication of The Washington Post’s interview, Judd Deere, a White House spokesperson, responded by denouncing Dr. Fauci’s professionalism and integrity, claiming the doctor “[chose] three days before an election to play politics”. Deere then continued to praise the President’s response to the pandemic and defend that “the risks [from coronavirus] today are dramatically lower than they were only a few months ago.”
- Most recently, the President publicly implied that he would fire Dr. Fauci “a little bit after the election” in response to the crowd’s enthusiastic chants to “fire Fauci” at a rally in South Florida on Sunday evening. It is yet unknown if the President’s pledge is possible since Fauci is a career public servant and is head of director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. President Trump is attempting to ease the process for firing federal employees in a new executive order, however, that has yet to result.
Fauci does provide some semblance of hope in the interview by crediting the growth in expertise for the declining death rate among Covid cases. He believes “the surge of cases is going to be counterbalanced by better experience”.
