USA Today says Peter Navarro’s op-ed criticizing Anthony Fauci was “misleading” and did not meet “fact-check standards”

Navarro said of Fauci: “He has been wrong in everything that I have interacted with him. In late January, when he was presenting the case on behalf of the president to shoot down flights from China, Fauci struggled against the president’s valiant decision, which could well have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. When I warned in the end of January in a memo about a potentially deadly pandemic, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was telling the media not to worry. ”

The White House said the opinion piece was not approved prior to publication, and USA Today said Navarro’s opinion piece did not meet his standards. The deterioration of what was once an appearance of unity, fragile though it may be, is probably far from over, as Trump’s moves to fire Fauci will likely receive a backlash from the public and medical community, and also will be subject to appeals. , the experts say. As of February, Trump said that the coronavirus would “disappear,” “disappear,” and / or “disappear” more than a dozen times.

On Wednesday night, Bill Sternberg, editor of the editorial page for USA Today, wrote in a note at the top of the opinion piece: “Several of Navarro’s criticisms of Fauci – about travel restrictions to China, the coronavirus risk and falling death rates – were context misleading or lacking in context. As such, Navarro’s opinion piece did not meet USA Today’s fact-checking standards. ” He added: “We dealt directly with Navarro and we don’t know if he spoke to anyone else in the White House about his statement.”

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Fauci dismissed Navarro’s opinion piece and told the Atlantic: “I just want to do my job. I am very good at it. I think I can contribute. And I’m going to keep doing it. “When asked how he can continue when the government appears to be actively trying to discredit him, this time by a prominent White House figure, Fauci replied,” That’s a little strange. ” They would be counterproductive to the Trump administration: “It does nothing but reflect badly on them. I cannot understand in my wildest dreams why they would want to do that.” Fauci said of Navarro: “He is alone in a world.”

In a separate interview with Dean Lloyd Minor of Stanford Medicine, Fauci took another hit at the government’s response, saying there is a way to flatten the curve for new cases. “We know we can do that if we close. Europeans have. People in Asia have done it. We are not closing completely. “Contrary to the President’s insistence that it is time to restart the country’s economy, Fauci paints a darker picture:” It has happened: your worst nightmare, the perfect storm. We have not yet begun to see the end. It is still a global threat. “

Fauci, meanwhile, told the Financial Times that he has not informed the president since June 2. After the doctor criticized the United States’ response to the pandemic and Trump criticized the doctor, Fauci made a discreet visit to the White House on Monday. with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff. It came a day after the administration published a list for the Washington Post that contained criticism of the doctor, and signaled a new assault on relations between Fauci and the Trump administration.

That list included comments made by Fauci in the early days of the pandemic about how he was not immediately concerned about the asymptomatic spread and how Americans did not need to wear masks. Some reporters described it as an “opposition investigation,” a description that the White House has flatly denied. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention originally told the public not to wear masks, but together with the Trump administration, they reversed that policy in April.

But the reaction to that “list” was quick. On Tuesday, Thomas File, Jr., president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, released a statement on behalf of his colleagues, supporting Fauci. “The only way out of this pandemic is by following science and developing evidence-based prevention practices and treatment protocols as new scientifically rigorous data become available. Knowledge changes over time. That is to be expected. If we have any hope of ending this crisis, the entire United States must support public health experts, including Dr. Fauci, and support science. “

On Sunday, Admiral Brett Giroir, testing coordinator for the Department of Health and Human Services, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Fauci was not correct in his advice to states to curb business opening: ” I respect Dr. Fauci a lot, but Dr. Fauci is not 100% correct, and neither necessarily, he admits, he has all the national interest in mind. He looks at it from a very limited public health point of view, “said Giroir .

Last week, Trump also doubled down on his criticism of Fauci’s response to the pandemic. “Dr. Fauci is a good man, but he has made a lot of mistakes,” he said on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show. “As if you didn’t have to ban them from entering heavily infected China. of lives. ” He added: “They have been wrong about many things, including facial masks,” he added. “Perhaps they are wrong, perhaps not, but many of them said not to wear a mask, not to wear a mask. Now they say to wear a mask. So a lot of mistakes were made, a lot of mistakes. ”

“When you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say that we are doing well. I mean, we just are not, ”Fauci told the FiveThirtyEight podcast last week, which appears to have been taken by the White House as a direct reprimand from the president. Most voters said they approved of Fauci, although most Republicans said it for a mustache, according to a New York Times / Siena College poll of 1,337 registered voters June 17-22. Overall, 67% of voters said they approved of the doctor, including 81% of Democrats, 51% of Republicans, and 67% of independents.

On April 3, the administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reversed their policies on the masks and said that everyone, not just medical workers, as previously stated, should wear face covers. That same day, Trump said his administration recommended wearing fabric face covers. However, he said that he himself would not wear a mask. “You do not have to do it. I’m choosing not to. “In a rare break with his tradition of avoiding covering his face, he donned one last weekend while visiting the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Last April, Trump suggested a treatment for COVID-19: “I see the disinfectant, where it removes it in a minute. One minute. And is there any way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost by cleaning? He added: “So, assuming we hit the body in tremendous light, either ultraviolet or just very powerful.” The president’s comments elicited widespread criticism from healthcare professionals and Reckitt Benckiser RBGPF,
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what he does to Lysol and Dettol, and contempt on social media. The next day, Trump said he was not being serious. “I was sarcastically asking journalists like you a question just to see what would happen,” he said.

COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, had infected 13.6 million people worldwide and 3.5 million in the United States as of Thursday. It had killed 584,922 people worldwide and 137,419 in the US Fauci also said on Wednesday that reducing social distancing requirements and reopening the economy too soon could ultimately cost even more lives: “We statistically know that you are going to infecting someone else, who is going to infect someone else, who are suddenly going to infect someone who gets sick and goes to the hospital. ”

In calling for the nation’s schools to reopen, Trump suggested the exact opposite: “You are losing many lives by keeping things closed.”

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