Fauci rejects Trump’s claim of inflated death rate

WASHINGTON — Two top U.S. health officials on Sunday disputed a claim by President Donald Trump that federal data on COVID19 cases and deaths in the United States is overblown, and both expressed optimism that the pace of vaccinations is picking up.

“The deaths are real deaths,” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on ABC News' This Week, adding that jampacked hospitals and stressedout health-care workers are “not fake. That's real.”

Fauci and U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who appeared on CNN'S State of the Union, defended the accuracy of coronavirus data published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after Trump attacked the agency's tabulation methods.

“The number of cases and deaths of the China Virus is far exaggerated in the United States because of the @CDCgov's ridiculous method of determination compared to other countries, many of whom report, purposely, very inaccurately and low,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

Trump, a Republican who leaves office on Jan. 20 after losing a bid for a second term to Democrat Joe Biden, has frequently downplayed the severity of the pandemic. He has also scorned and ignored federal recommendations for containing the spread.

More than 20 million people have been infected in the United States and nearly 347,000 have died — or one out of every 950 U.S. residents — since the virus first emerged in China in late 2019, according to the CDC.

“From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those numbers and I think people need to be very aware that it's not just about the deaths,” Adams said. “It's about the hospitalizations, the capacity.”