The White House is shooting down media speculation over the weekend that President Trump was preparing to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Trump retweeted a tweet Sunday night calling for Fauci to be sacked after the top health adviser acknowledged lives might have been saved if the administration had acted earlier to the coronavirus outbreak and implied Trump didn't heed his advice.
"This media chatter is ridiculous — President Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci," spokesman Hogan Gidley said, the Wall Street Journal reported.
"Dr. Fauci has been and remains a trusted advisor to President Trump."
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The tweet spotlighted by the president pointed to a Feb. 29 "Today" show interview in which Fauci said in response to concern about the virus spreading through large gatherings that Americans should carry on with their daily routines as normal.
Written by a former Republican congressional candidate, DeAnna Lorraine, the tweet said: "Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US public at large. Time to #FireFauci…"
On Sunday, Fauci acknowledged to CNN's Jake Tapper that if "mitigation" had begun earlier, lives could have been saved, "[b]ut there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then."
Tapper cited a New York Times report that Fauci and other top officials wanted to issue social-distancing guidelines as early as the third week of February but didn't announce them until March 16.
"Why?" Tapper asked.
"You know, Jake, as I've said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint," Fauci replied. "We make a recommendation. Often the recommendation is taken, sometimes it's not. But it is what it is, we are where we are right now."
In an interview Sunday with MSNBC's Al Sharpton, Fauci was asked, "When did it occur to you ... in your capacity that this was a problem that would reach pandemic proportions?"
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, gave a lengthy answer, recalling China's misreporting of the problem in December and January.
After prompting by Sharpton, Fauci said he became aware that the outbreak would become a pandemic "towards the middle to end of January."
The follow-up question is unclear, but Fauci appears to have understood that Sharpton was asking him to confirm that he had advised the president of his concern at that time, replying, "You bet."
Sharpton said: "OK. And what did you begin advising the administration and those authorities that we were in fact seeing something different here and this could be a major problem at that time?"
Fauci replied: "You bet. And then, then that’s when it became clear that there are a couple of ways of addressing that. You could either prevent or try to block the influx of new cases from out of the country, and already cases had come in from China, to try and say, ‘That’s it, we got to stop that because now we already have cases here.’ And then it switched to Europe. And when Italy had their outbreak, it became clear that that became a danger. So that’s when cases were cut off from coming in from Europe and then ultimately the U.K. But by that time we had enough cases in our own country that the ability to do the containment slipped then into the need for mitigation and we saw what happened in New York."
See the segment in the MSNBC interview:
'Hypothetical question'
At the coronavirus daily briefing Monday, Fauci said he wanted to respond to "interpretations" of his response Sunday to "a hypothetical question" regarding to the timing of mitigation efforts.
"I mean, obviously, if mitigation works and you initiate it earlier, you probably would have saved more lives," he said.
Fauci said that was taken to mean "someone was at fault."
"The first and only time that Dr. (Deborah) Birx and I formally made a recommendation to have strong mitigation, the president listened to the recommendation," he said.
That was the "15 days to slow the spread" guideline issued March 16.
The next time a recommendation was made, he said, was recommending the 15 days be expanded to 30 days.
"The president went with the health recommendations," he said.
'Not a major threat'
While Fauci told Sharpton he became aware of the magnitude of the outbreak on Jan. 21, the White House health adviser said in an interview with Newsmax TV that the coronavirus was "not a major threat" to the United States.
Anchor Greg Kelly asked: "Bottom line. We don't have to worry about this one, right?"
"Obviously, you need to take it seriously, and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing," Fauci replied.
"But, this not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about."
In January, Dr Tony Fauci was on my show telling America not to worry about the Coronavirus—that it wasn’t a major threat to the people. January 21, 2020, 20 seconds: pic.twitter.com/RLDivpgbAq
— Greg Kelly (@gregkellyusa) April 3, 2020
In the Feb. 29 "Today" show interview, Fauci was asked: "So, Dr. Fauci, it's Saturday morning in America. People are waking up now with real concerns about this. They want to go to malls, movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits? And if so, how?
Fauci replied: "No. Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything you're doing on a day-by-day basis.
"Right now the risk is still low, but this could change."
See the "Today" show remarks:
Fauci: February 29 pic.twitter.com/PxwbdQ5WSu
— Steph (@steph93065) April 12, 2020
On March 9, Fauci told reporters at the daily coronavirus task force briefing at the White House he had no problem with healthy people going on cruises.
"If you are a healthy young person, there is no reason if you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship," he said in response to a question by John Roberts of Fox News.
Further, Fauci co-authored an article published March 26 in the New England Journal of Medicine predicting the fatality rate for the coronavirus will turn out to be like that of a "severe seasonal influenza."
In an exceptionally bad flu season, the case fatality rate is about one-tenth of 1 percent, the authors wrote.
That assessment was a signicant downgrade from the figure Fauci cited in testimony to the House of Representatives on March 11 in which he called for a cancellation of any large gatherings.
Fauci estimated at the time – prior to the current shutdown – that the true mortality rate of the coronavirus outbreak, taking into account unreported cases, was "somewhere around 1%, which means it is 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu."
Radio host Rush Limbaugh on Monday wondered why Fauci is getting a pass on the controversy over unpreparedness.
"Why does only President Trump face any accountability?" Limbaugh asked. "Because this is a political hit job taking place right before our very eyes."