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Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, has criticized Donald Trump’s re-election campaign for using his words out of context to make it appear that he is praising the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,” Fauci said in a statement to CNN on Sunday. “Comments attributed to me without my permission in the [Republican] The campaign ads were taken out of context from a comprehensive statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials. “
In the video posted Saturday, Fauci can be heard saying “I can’t imagine that … anyone could be doing more,” as the ad boasts of Trump’s response to Covid-19, which has claimed his life. of more than 214,000 Americans and infected. more than 7.7 million people.
The clip comes from an interview Fauci gave to Fox News, in which he described the work he and other members of the White House coronavirus task force did to respond to the virus, not Trump.
Aaron Rupar
(@atrupar)Fauci responded to this: “The comments attributed to me without my permission in the Republican campaign ad were taken out of context from a comprehensive statement I made months ago.” (via @jaketapper) https://t.co/G57Q9rqCXj
Most Americans do not approve of the president’s handling of the crisis, according to several recent polls. The Trump campaign said it would not stop running ads.
“These are Dr. Fauci’s own words,” said Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh. “The video is from a nationally broadcast television interview in which Dr. Fauci praised the work of the Trump administration.
“The words are precise and come directly from Dr. Fauci’s mouth.”
For months during the course of the pandemic, Trump has often disagreed with Fauci, delivering conflicting public health messages and publicly expressing his frustration with the doctor’s more sober view of the crisis.
In the spring, when the virus ravaged the northeast of the country, Fauci was a regular at White House coronavirus press conferences. But in June, Fauci said he was no longer invited to the briefings, and Trump told Fox News that Fauci was “a good man, but he made a lot of mistakes.” Polls conducted in the early summer found that the majority of Americans trusted Fauci’s assessments of the pandemic, while less than a third trusted Trump’s.
As cases began to rise in many parts of the country, Trump encouraged states to quickly reopen their economies over the summer. At the time, Fauci warned against reopening without proper social distancing measures, contradicting Trump’s message that states should not delay.
Fauci has largely remained a neutral and authoritative public health figure throughout the course of the pandemic, refusing to harshly criticize the administration’s approach and opting to conduct dozens of virtual interviews to offer her recommendations to Americans. Trump has since replaced Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, another respected public health expert who once attended the White House press conference, with Dr. Scott Atlas, who is neither an epidemiologist nor an expert on infectious diseases.
Atlas, a regular on the Fox news network, has come under scrutiny by public health experts for questioning the effectiveness of the masks and parroting the Trump administration’s optimistic schedule for a Covid-19 vaccine.
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