Dr Anthony Fauci counters Trump claims amid crisis: 'I just want to get the facts out'
Dr Anthony Fauci, the head of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has not been fired.
That might not seem much in the way of news but Dr Fauci is the public face of the US scientific community in the face of the coronavirus outbreak, and as such must regularly appear alongside Donald Trump at the White House podium.
Across the US media, the doctor’s reaction to every Trumpian claim, exaggeration or outright lie is frantically parsed for meaning, his occasional absence from the podium subject to national debate.
In a brief interview with Science magazine published on Sunday, Dr Fauci, 79, was asked how it felt to “stand there as the representative of truth and facts [when] things are being said that aren’t true and aren’t factual”.
“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” he said. “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”
That, Dr Fauci said, involved members of the White House coronavirus taskforce who, “the next time they sit down with him and talk about what he’s going to say, they will say, ‘By the way, Mr President, be careful about this and don’t say that.’”
In one notable recent example, Trump spoke from the podium on Friday about the idea that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug, might treat the coronavirus. Dr Fauci then knocked the claim down, gently.
“Many of the things out there are what I have called ‘anecdotal reports’,” he said. “The information that you’re referring to specifically is anecdotal. It was not done in a controlled clinical trial, so you really can’t make any definitive statement about it.”
He subsequently told the New York
Times he did not want to “embarrass” Trump, adding: “I don’t want to act like a tough guy, like I stood up to the president. I just want to get the facts out. And instead of saying, ‘You’re wrong,’ all you need to do is continually talk about what the data are and what the evidence is.”
Fauci told Science he was “sort of exhausted. But other than that, I’m good. I mean, I’m not, to my knowledge, coronavirus infected. To my knowledge, I haven’t been fired.”
Asked how he hadn’t been fired, having corrected the president so many times, he said: “Well, that’s pretty interesting because to his [Trump’s] credit, even though we disagree on some things, he listens. He goes his own way. He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”
Dr Fauci also described the process by which Trump prepares for briefings, which some say should not be carried live, given the president’s use of the podium to attack reporters and his political enemies.
“We sit down for an hour and a half,” Dr Fauci said, “go over all the issues on the agenda. And then we proceed from there to an anteroom right in front of the Oval Office to talk about what are going to be the messages, what are the kind of things we’re going to want to emphasize?
“Then we go in to see the president, we present to him and somebody writes a speech. Then he gets up and ad libs on his speech. And then we’re up there to try and answer questions.”
Asked how often he disagreed with the president, Dr Fauci said: “I don’t disagree in the substance. It is expressed in a way that I would not express it, because it could lead to some misunderstanding about what the facts are about a given subject.”
He was also asked about a moment on Friday when Trump joked about the “deep state department” and the doctor was seen to smile ruefully then rub his brow and jaw. It became an internet meme.
Dr Fauci declined to comment. He was also asked about Trump’s decision to refer to the coronavirus, the scientific name of which is Covid-19, as the “Chinese virus”. Would he ever do the same?
“No.”