« Dr. Fauci is a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes. »
These are love taps by Trump standards, scarcely worth of the term “jabs.” But it’s clear enough from the tone that there’s some tension here and there probably has been for awhile.
It’s neither surprising nor particularly interesting that POTUS would resent a deputy who’s more trusted than he is and who undermines his plans to reopen the economy every time he says something worrisome about the virus. What’s surprising and interesting is Fauci’s willingness to push back.
I wonder if there’s a strategy there.
Anyway, first here’s Trump last night on “Hannity”. Yesterday Fauci singled out Florida as a state that probably should been more mindful of the federal guidelines — Trump’s guidelines — in judging when it was safe to reopen. What do you make of that, said Hannity? The president:
“First of all, the mortality rate, and Dr. Fauci is a nice man but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” Trump said, mentioning the China travel ban, that had tens of thousands of exceptions. “But a lot of them said ‘Don’t wear a mask, don’t wear a mask.’ Now they are saying ‘wear a mask.’ A lot of mistakes were made, a lot of mistakes. Let me just make one statement, we do testing like nobody’s ever done testing. And when we test, the more you test, the more cases you find.”
He’s right about that. Fauci was singing a different tune about masks in early March, when the virus was quietly spreading in cities like New York. He later explained that that’s because the feds worried there wouldn’t be masks available for doctors and nurses if the public made a run on them, but who knows how much lower the scale of the spread would have been if masking of the public had begun sooner — even if it had come at the expense of medical professionals?
On the other hand, there are plenty of Americans who won’t wear masks now. How many would have instantly masked up in March if Fauci had recommended it? In any case, he’s acknowledged that the “mixed messages” about masks early on from authorities weren’t helpful.
Today he did an interview with the Financial Times and used it as an opportunity to hit back. First he offered this thought on the president having claimed recently that 99 percent of infections are “totally harmless”:
Fauci on Trump’s 99% harmless claim: “I’m trying to figure out where the president got that number. What I think happened is that someone told him that the general mortality is about 1%.
