US president’s attacks drag Fauci into fray
Leading virus expert caught in election battle crossfire, as defenders come out
Anthony Fauci, the US government’s top infectious disease expert, has said he wants to stay a scientist and “completely apolitical”. Instead, he finds himself caught in the crossfire of the presidential campaign, with one side calling him a “disaster” and the other coming to his defense.
“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” US President Donald Trump said of the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his administration’s other public health officials on Monday.
“Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb. But there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. But Fauci’s a disaster,” Trump said during a call with campaign staff on the third day of a campaign swing in western states as the Nov 3 election draws nearer.
In the early stage of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, whenever Fauci or his other team members were not present at the White House Coronavirus Task Force briefings, it would make headlines.
The president and Fauci have been at odds over how best to handle a pandemic that had claimed at least 220,000 lives in the United States as of Monday, according to Johns Hopkins University data, with the president and some other leading officials repeatedly flouting the advice of Fauci and other public health scientists.
“He’s been here for, like, 500 years. He’s like this wonderful sage telling us how — Fauci, if we listened to him, we’d have 700,000 ( or) 800,000 deaths,” Trump said.
Trump’s remarks came a day after Fauci’s appearance in a CBS 60 Minutes episode on Sunday, in which the infectious diseases expert dismissed the president’s claim that the end of the pandemic was just around the corner and said it was not surprising that Trump contracted the coronavirus after he held a series of large events with few face coverings.
‘ Out of context’
Early last week, the 79- year- old appeared on ABC News and in some other interviews in which he criticized a Trump campaign advertisement that he said took his comments out of context.
The 30- second ad, aired on Oct 10 to promote the president’s response to the pandemic, includes a clip of Fauci saying: “I can’t imagine that ... anybody could be doing more.”
The Trump campaign said Fauci did say those words and refused to take it down.
Fauci, who earlier said he wanted to be “completely apolitical” and remain a “scientist, a physician and a public health person”, said on Thursday: “I have stated without any equivocation that I’m an apolitical person, I don’t like to be associated with anything political or any, certainly, any political party campaign.”
But the campaigns seemed to have dragged him in.
At a rally in Arizona on Monday, Trump railed against his rival, Democratic candidate Joe Biden, for pledging to take the advice of scientists, saying “Biden wants to lock you down, he wants to listen to Dr Fauci”.
To the new attack line, Biden simply tweeted “yes”.
“Coronavirus infections are spiking across the country, but President Trump decided to attack Dr Fauci again today as a ‘ disaster’ and call public health experts ‘ idiots’ instead of laying out a plan to beat this virus or heeding their advice about how we can save lives and get our economy moving again,” Biden said.
Ashish K. Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said Trump’s undermining of Fauci and his message makes it “so much harder to control this pandemic”.
“This is very sort of disturbing, upsetting to hear the president say this. We’re in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century, and Dr Fauci is America’s most respected infectious disease expert for good reason,” he said in an interview with CNN.