Fauci stuck to science, without the politics
The doctor was clear on risks of reopening early
It was the president vs. the doctor, the commander-in-chief in the Rose Garden on Monday and the nation’s most trusted doctor in a Senate hearing room on Tuesday.
Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert at the National Institutes of Health, works for President Donald Trump, of course. But with a measured tone and a distinctive Brooklyn accent, Fauci effectively undercut the message that his boss had championed the day before about how to respond to COVID-19. Trump was impatient, quick to claim success and eager to have the country be- gin reopening. Fauci counseled patience, saying the medical realities mean that the nation isn’t ready to reopen and that doing it too early would carry a deadly cost.
That is unlikely to endear him to Trump, who already had sidelined Fauci from recent briefings.
Fauci’s comments before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions weren’t political or partisan, a fact that made them more powerful. He stuck to the science, to the data points, to the clinical process – and to the consequences of reopening the nation too soon.
“If that occurs, there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,” he said, warning that could cost lives and set back an economic recovery.
In contrast, Trump had struck a victorious note.
“We have met the moment, and we have prevailed,” he declared Monday. (In response to a reporter’s question, he said he was referring to the effort to ramp up the availability of testing, not to the overall battle against the novel coronavirus.) He has encouraged governors to reopen stores and businesses and even cheered people who took to
the streets to defy shutdown orders.
The president had picked the Senate hearing as a friendlier forum than the oversight committee in the Democraticcontrolled House that also sought Fauci’s testimony.
“The House is a setup,” Trump told reporters last week. “The House is a bunch of Trump haters.” Instead, he said, Fauci “will be testifying in front of the Senate, and he looks forward to doing that.”
But the less combative tone in the Republican-controlled Senate may have made the criticism of the administration’s claims more convincing. By the standards of the day, the session could even be described as bipartisan. It had the somber air of officials seriously considering a national crisis.
Democratic senators did blast the administration’s record and plans, or lack of plans. Trump “has been more focused on fighting against the truth than fighting the virus,” said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the panel’s top-ranking Democrat. “Americans have sadly paid the price.”
Several Republicans, including Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, raised questions about the administration’s record and its recommendations on reopening stores and offices.
“I find our testing record nothing to celebrate whatsoever,” said Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, Trump’s most persistent critic among congressional Republicans. He asked Fauci about Trump’s accusation that former President Barack Obama was responsible for the lack of a vaccine for the coronavirus. Had Obama – or Trump, for that matter – done something that made creating a vaccine less likely?
“No, no, senator,” Fauci replied. “Not at all.”
Fauci also disputed a theory that deaths were being overcounted, which some partisans have suggested was an effort to make Trump look bad. The official toll has topped 80,000. “Almost certainly it’s higher,” he said, because of those who died at home, not in a hospital.
At the White House briefing Tuesday, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s push to reopen the country. “There are consequences that run the other way when we stay closed down as a country,” she told reporters, citing reports of an increase in substance abuse and a decline in cancer health screenings. “We’ve got to encourage this country to safely reopen.”
Still, even the setting for the Senate hearing underscored just how difficult that whole process is going to be.
Alexander ran the hearing from the den in his Tennessee home because he was self-quarantining after a staffer tested positive for the virus. Murray joined remotely from her home. A halfdozen senators gathered in the hearing room, but they were seated 6 feet apart. Some wore protective masks.
The four officials testified from remote locations, too. Three were selfisolating because they had been exposed to someone who had tested positive for the virus. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was at his home office. Adm. Brett Giroir, Trump’s coronavirus testing czar, seemed to be at the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters, across Capitol Hill. Stephen Hahn, the Food and Drug commissioner, also testified via video.
Fauci was in his home office. “I have never made myself out to be the endall-and-only voice in this,” he said in response to a question from Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky. “I’m a scientist, a physician and a public health official. I give advice on the best scientific evidence.”
Which was precisely the point.
By the standards of the day, Tuesday’s session could be described as bipartisan. It had the somber air of navigating a national crisis.