In an interview with actor Matthew McConaughey on Thursday night, White House top epidemiologist Dr Anthony Fauci said “everyone should use” a mask – a contradiction with President Trump who on Thursday night criticized the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden for it invoking such a mandate.
McConaughey, after getting Fauci – the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – over the record that the coronavirus is primarily a respiratory virus, asked him if there should be a mask mandate nationwide.
“You’re making a really good point that it’s the subject of a lot of debate,” Fauci replied. “My recommendation as you probably know, because I’ve said it so many times in public, is that we absolutely must have universal values of masks.”
Fauci added: “The difficulty with mandates is that it tends to be a pushback, ‘should you waste time maintaining it, or can you really use the power of persuasion from the leadership, anyone who does it? “Because it’s so important?”
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The actor also grieves Fauci over the question of whether it’s true that blood type affects how likely people are to get the virus – Fauci said yes, but it’s a “minuscule” difference that people should not worry about. How likely antibodies are to help humans prevent them from becoming infected a second time – Fauci said they could, but the evidence of how effective they are is not yet clear. And whether Advil makes the coronavirus worse – no, said Fauci, laughing at the question.
Fauci added that a vaccine is likely to be more effective than natural anti-antibodies and express optimism about its widespread availability in 2021.
But Trump – and many administrators, most notably Republicans – have opposed mask mandates, although Trump recently began encouraging people to wear masks when they leave their homes. Trump said in a press release on Thursday night that Biden “stopped playing politics with the virus” in connection with his call for a national mask mandate. Trump noted that several states face different circumstances with the pandemic.
“Every once in a while, Biden has been wrong about the virus, ignoring the scientific evidence and putting the left’s policy in front of facts,” Trump said at the briefing. “Sleepy Joe is destroying both China and Europe. He opposed the China travel ban that I imposed very early on and the European ban that I imposed quite early on. ”
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Trump’s remarks came hours after Biden appeared alongside Democratic presidential running mate Kamala Harris ahead of a virtual lender in Wilmington, Del. At the event, Biden called for a nationwide mask mandate, urging administrators to ask for masks to be worn outdoors in all states for at least the next three months.
“We will encourage Americans to wear masks if they cannot distance themselves socially,” Trump said. “But we must not let the full weight of the federal government bring on law-abiding Americans to achieve this goal.”
Trump added: “All Americans need to have their freedoms. I trust the American people and their rulers very much … Joe does not know too much.”
Trump has also been criticized for not encouraging a stricter and longer-term closure of the U.S. economy to actually reduce real numbers of coronaviruses, with many citing the fact that the U.S. now has much higher numbers of cases than some Asian countries that open successfully. Fauci said Thursday that the problems the U.S. is now facing could be attributed to some states reopening too soon.
“What they did is not exactly [what] We did. When they shut down, they shut out like ‘scared,’ “Fauci said. And they went to a very, very low baseline. If we conclude when you look at tracking the number of people who did not go to work, the number of visits to public places, we conclude, but it was never at the level that the Asian countries did. “
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Fauci added: “We went up and down instead of going all the way, we placed 20,000 cases a day, which is totally unacceptable. And then, when we started doing things that were understandable and appropriate, we left America. reopen, “according to the guidelines, what happened was that we did not do so in a uniform manner. Some states did it better than others. … That what happened when we started opening, it went up to 30,000, 40, 50, 60, and we reached 70,000 a day. We are now after 50, but we would have been on the road to practically nothing and we did not. “
Many have criticized the approach that characterized Fauci, saying that Americans had a plan to ‘flatten the curve’ and keep hospitals under capacity to stop deaths – not to eliminate them almost with a strict lockdown. However, reopening has put a lot of strain on hospitals in many places, especially in the South and West.
“The goal was to flatten the curve. It was never to stop anyone ever getting this virus,” Bethany Mandel, an editor at Ricochet, tweeted earlier this month. “That’s not possible. The genius is out of the bottle.”
Fox News’ Thomas Barrabi contributed to this report.
