The White House has launched a campaign to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci for openly disagreeing with President Donald Trump in favor of science, NBC News reports.
The effort comes as Trump works to marginalize the nation’s leading infectious disease expert and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response.
In a remarkable action by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official told NBC News on Sunday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.” To bolster the case, the official provided NBC News with a list of nearly a dozen past comments by Fauci earlier in the pandemic that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous.
Among them: Fauci’s comments in January that coronavirus was “not a major threat” and “not driven by asymptomatic carriers” and Fauci’s comment in March that “people should not be walking around with masks.”
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It was a move more characteristic of a political campaign furtively disseminating “opposition research” about an opponent than of a White House struggling to contain a pandemic that has already killed more than 135,000 Americans, according to an NBC News tally.
Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had been a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and a key communicator with the public about the virus until the president soured on Fauci’s sober assessments of the situation, which have increasingly conflicted with the more sanguine picture of a virus in retreat that the president has sought to paint.
The attempt to discredit Fauci comes amid signs of growing tensions between Fauci and the president. Fauci said last week he hadn’t seen Trump in person since June 2 and hadn’t briefed him in person in at least two months. Trump told Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren last week that Fauci has made mistakes and added, “I disagree with him.”
Another member of the coronavirus task force, Admiral Brett Giroir, added to the Fauci pile-on today when he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Fauci has not always been correct.
“I respect Dr. Fauci a lot, but Dr. Fauci is not 100 percent right and he also doesn’t necessarily, he admits that, have the whole national interest in mind. He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view,” Giroir said.
The attacks on Fauci also come as coronavirus surges nationwide, which Trump has repeatedly downplayed as a result of increased testing rather than increased infections. Florida on Sunday reported over 15,000 new cases, the most any state has reported in a single day since the pandemic began. The U.S. on Friday also surpassed 70,000 new coronavirus cases nationwide for the first time ever.
