https:\/\/www.vox.com\/2021\/1\/25\/22249050\/fauci-birx-interviews-trump-coronavirus-response<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It didn\u2019t take long for the two scientific faces of former President Donald Trump\u2019s failed coronavirus response to speak out about how dysfunctional efforts to curb the pandemic really were under the 45th president.<\/p>\n
On the first weekend following Trump\u2019s departure from the White House, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx \u2014 both members of the Trump White House coronavirus task force coordinated by Birx \u2014 did interviews with national media outlets in which they described a culture in the Trump White House that discounted scientific expertise and put a premium on the type of denialism that resulted in Trump continuing to hold packed political rallies even as coronavirus deaths and cases soared in the fall.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe would say things like: \u2018This is an outbreak. Infectious diseases run their own course unless one does something to intervene.\u2019 And then he would get up and start talking about, \u2018It\u2019s going to go away, it\u2019s magical, it\u2019s going to disappear,\u2019\u201d Fauci told the New York Times.<\/p>\n
Birx made similar comments to CBS during an interview with Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan, saying, \u201cthere were people [in the White House] who definitely believed that this was a hoax,\u201d and adding that Trump had a penchant for listening to people who told him what he wanted to hear, even if that information had no scientific basis.<\/p>\n
\u201cI saw the president presenting graphs that I never made,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I know that someone \u2014 someone out there, or someone inside \u2014 was creating a parallel set of data and graphics that were shown to the president. I don\u2019t know to this day who, but I know what I sent up, and I know what was in his hands was different than that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fauci corroborated that point, telling the Times that in the early days of the pandemic, he was \u201creally concerned\u201d to observe that Trump \u201cwas getting input from people who were calling him up, I don\u2019t know who, people he knew from business, saying, \u2018Hey, I heard about this drug, isn\u2019t it great?\u2019 or, \u2018Boy, this convalescent plasma is really phenomenal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would take just as seriously their opinion \u2014 based on no data, just anecdote \u2014 that something might really be important,\u201d added Fauci. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just hydroxychloroquine, it was a variety of alternative-medicine-type approaches. It was always, \u2018A guy called me up, a friend of mine from blah, blah, blah.\u2019 That\u2019s when my anxiety started to escalate.\u201d”<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
“What Birx and Fauci said during their interviews isn\u2019t necessarily surprising. We\u2019ve long understood that the Trump White House\u2019s coronavirus response was a disaster, especially when compared with countries like Australia and Japan that have done a much better job limiting infections and deaths. We\u2019ve known that Trump has a tendency to engage in wishful thinking and has an aversion to scientific reasoning.<\/p>\n
But what Birx\u2019s and Fauci\u2019s willingness to speak out in the immediate aftermath of Trump\u2019s departure from office does illustrate is just how bad things were under the previous administration. It now falls upon the Biden administration to try to clean up the mess left behind after a year of politically motivated short-term thinking, in which public health experts like Fauci and Birx had to struggle on a daily basis with questions about whether it was worth it for them to keep showing up at work.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1163,588,409,483,221,788,170],"class_list":["post-4310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-birx","tag-corona","tag-coronavirus","tag-covid-19","tag-donald-trump","tag-fauci","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4311,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4310\/revisions\/4311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}