President Trump Sidelines Fauci

Health Politics U.S.

The White House has grown increasingly concerned with the “number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things.”

Fauci is ““never in the Oval [Office] anymore,” and the President last spoke with him at the beginning of June according to senior officials.

And tensions between Fauci and the President are increasingly spilling out into the open.

During a Fox News interview last week with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci “is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.” When asked by journalist Greta Van Susteren about Fauci’s comment that the country was not in a good place, Trump said flatly, “I disagree with him.”

Fauci has also made his displeasure known. “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not,” Fauci told the left-leaning FiveThirtyEight podcast last week.

Fauci is the head of the governments’s coronavirus task force. And despite the tensions, he has no plans to resign. As of now, the President also has no intention to fire him.

The White House points to made several errors made by Fauci regarding Covid19 in the time since the outbreak has begun. A list of which was first given to The Washington Post by the White House.

They include asserting that Covid19 was not transmissible between people; saying at the time of the first few cases of Coronavirus in the U.S. that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis,” and advising Americans not to wear masks for protection.

Fauci now strongly recommends the wearing of masks and has since admitted that the only reason he advised against wearing masks was to save them for health care workers.

Photo by NIAID

Join the discussion