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Dr. Anthony Fauci was the “skunk at the picnic” in Donald Trump’s White House coronavirus task force, America’s leading public health expert told the New York Times in a candid interview Sunday.
More than 25 million cases of Covid-19 have been registered in the United States and about 420,000 people have died. The economy has sunk and the launch of vaccines has not been smooth. On Sunday, senior officials in the new Biden administration joined in the criticism of Trump’s response.
Fauci said some people had assumed he was “complicit in the distortions emanating from the stage” at the Covid briefings at the White House at the beginning of the pandemic, in which Trump spoke. He often clashed with the president, but said he never considered resigning.
“I felt that if I retired,” he said, “it would leave a void. Someone should not be afraid to tell the truth. [White House staff] I’d try to downplay the real issues and have a happy little talk about how things are. And I always said, ‘Wait a minute, wait, folks, this is serious business.’ So there was a joke, a friendly joke, you know, that I was the skunk at the picnic. “
Trump slammed Fauci and flirted with firing him, but never moved against the director of the widely experienced and loved National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which has served every president since 1984.
Fauci, 80, has previously discussed receiving death threats because of his differences with Trump on issues that include basic social mitigation measures and unproven treatments including bleach, ultraviolet light and the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, all pushed by Trump. as the death toll increased.
Fauci is married to Christine Grady, the top bioethicist from the National Institutes of Health. She, he told the Times, “mentioned that she might want to consider” leaving.
And after a conversation, he finally agreed with me. I always felt that if I walked away, the skunk from the picnic would no longer be at the picnic. Even if I was not very effective in changing everyone’s opinion, I felt the idea that they knew that nonsense could not be said without me rejecting it was important.
“I felt that it would be better for the country and better for the cause if I stayed, instead of leaving.”
Dr. Deborah Birx, an Army physician known for her work on AIDS and coordinator of Trump’s task force, also spoke this weekend about why she did not leave a White House that contained “people who definitely believed [Covid] it was a hoax ”.
Birx will be retiring soon. Fauci agreed to be Joe Biden’s chief science advisor, a role he said produced a “liberating feeling.” He told the Times he did not know how long he would serve the new president, who is only two years his junior.
“You know,” he said, “my whole life professionally I have been fighting pandemics… This is what I do.
“I think what I bring to the table is something that has a lot of added value. I want to keep doing it until he sees us crushing this outbreak, so people can get back to normal. And even after that, there is still HIV, to which I have dedicated a large part of my professional life.
Finally, Fauci was asked if he thought Trump “cost the country tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.”
“I can’t comment on that,” he said. “People always ask that and… making the direct connection that way, it becomes very damning. I just want to get away from it. I’m sorry.”
