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WASHINGTON: Two senior US health officials on Sunday (January 3) disputed a claim by President Donald Trump that federal data on COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States is exaggerated, and both expressed optimism. that the pace of vaccines is accelerating.
“The deaths are real deaths,” Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on ABC News’ This Week, adding that overcrowded hospitals and stressed healthcare workers “are not false. That is it is real “.
Fauci and US Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who appeared on CNN’s State of the Union, defended the accuracy of the coronavirus data released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Trump attacked the agency’s tabulation methods.
“The number of cases and deaths from the China virus is greatly exaggerated in the United States due to the ridiculous method of determination of @CDCgov compared to other countries, many of which deliberately report very inaccurately and low,” he wrote Trump on Twitter.
Trump, a Republican who leaves office Jan. 20 after losing a second-term bid to Democrat Joe Biden, has frequently downplayed the severity of the pandemic. It has also dismissed and ignored federal recommendations to contain the spread.
More than 20 million people have been infected in the United States and nearly 347,000 have died, or one in every 950 U.S. residents, since the virus first appeared in China in late 2019, according to the CDC.
“From a public health perspective, I have no reason to doubt those figures and I think people should be very aware that it is not just about the deaths,” Adams said. “It’s about the hospitalizations, the capacity.”
Fauci and Adams expressed optimism that the pace of vaccinating Americans against the virus is picking up after a slow start. More than 4.2 million people have been vaccinated since Dec. 14 with one of the two vaccines, well below the Trump administration’s goal of 20 million by the end of 2020.
“We wanted to reach 20 million, but one ray of hope is that in the last 72 hours, they have received 1.2 million doses in people’s arms, which is an average of about 500,000 per day,” Fauci said.
“We are not where we want to be. No doubt about that. But I think we can get there. “He said he believed the number of daily vaccinations could be expanded to 1 million and called for” a true partnership “between the federal and state governments.
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