Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, continues to contradict President Trump on coronavirus, including sharing differing descriptions about the seriousness of the pandemic in the US. While President Trump has pushed to reopen schools and downplay the surge of cases, Fauci warned in a Wall Street Journal podcast yesterday that states with resurging coronavirus cases “should seriously look at shutting down.” Fauci later noted that states with spiking coronavirus cases still can contain them by pausing their reopening processes, rather than shutting down a second time. In an interview published earlier today, Fauci said he’s “trying to figure out” where President Trump got the number behind his claim that 99% of coronavirus cases were “harmless.” On July 4, Trump sought to downplay the surge in Covid-19 cases by falsely claiming that testing in the US shows 99% of cases “are totally harmless.”
“I’m trying to figure out where the President got that number,” Fauci said in an interview with the Financial Times, published Friday. “What I think happened is that someone told him that the general mortality is about 1%. And he interpreted, therefore, that 99% is not a problem, when that’s obviously not the case.”
Fauci told FT that he last saw Trump on June 2 at the White House, and hasn’t personally briefed him in at least two months.