Covid 19 coronavirus: Dr. Anthony Fauci accuses Donald Trump of allowing ‘terrible’ things to happen

Dr. Anthony Fauci has launched a strong attack on the handling of the coronavirus by former US President Donald Trump, accusing him of allowing “terrible” things to happen in hopes of being re-elected.

Fauci, who is the director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and has been the chief medical adviser to seven US presidents, has detailed his time working with Trump in an interview with the British newspaper The Telegraph. .

During the early days of the pandemic, Trump had been receptive to Fauci’s advice on how best to tackle it.

But after it became clear that lockdown and social distancing measures would have to continue for the foreseeable future, hampering Trump’s re-election campaign in the process, he became openly combative with Fauci.

In May, Trump disagreed with the infectious disease expert at press conferences and criticized him on Twitter, where unfounded conspiracies about Fauci also gained ground.

‘When it became clear that to maintain my integrity and receive the right message [across] I had to publicly disagree with him, he did things, or allowed them to happen, that were terrible, “Fauci said.

“As Peter Navarro allowed [Trump’s trade adviser] write an editorial in USA Today saying that almost everything I said was wrong.

“It allowed the White House communications department to send a list to all the media, all the networks, all the cables, all the written press, about all the mistakes I made, which was absolute nonsense because there were no mistakes.”

In the last two months of his presidency, Trump had halted any effort to combat the pandemic, leaving scientists “acting almost alone, in the sense of aimless,” Fauci said.

Fauci now has armed federal agents watching him at all times, while his wife and adult children have also faced public harassment.

But the hardest thing for Fauci was accepting the fact that Trump’s actions resulted in preventable cases of coronavirus, the health expert said.

“When your main job is to save lives and alleviate suffering, and you see some of the things going on around you that not only don’t alleviate suffering but make it worse,” Fauci said.

‘POSSIBLE’ MASKS UNTIL 2022

Despite the fact that US President Joe Biden is now overseeing an aggressive launch of the coronavirus vaccine, Fauci believes it is “possible” that Americans will continue to wear face masks in 2022.

During an interview on CNN’s State Of The Union, Fauci said that any changes to masking mandates would depend on virus levels in the community.

“When it goes down a lot and the vast majority of people in the population are vaccinated, then I would feel comfortable saying, you know, ‘We have to take off our masks,'” he said.

But he said the United States would have a “significant degree of normalcy” once more people are vaccinated.

The country has registered more than 28 million cases of coronavirus and almost 500,000 deaths from the disease.