Fauci sidelined as Trump's White House steps up
briefing campaign
The president says the scientist leading the US fight
against the virus has ‘made a lot of mistakes’
Peter
Beaumont
Mon 13 Jul
2020 13.44 BSTLast modified on Mon 13 Jul 2020 14.03 BST
Anthony Fauci’s approval rating of 67% is almost three
times that of Trump’s.
He is the
US scientist who became the figurehead of attempts to combat the country’s
coronavirus epidemic, described in some quarters as “America’s doctor”.
Now Anthony
Fauci appears sidelined by Donald Trump’s White House after repeatedly
contradicting the president’s view about the effectiveness of the government
response.
In recent
days the 79-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases has come under increasing fire from the president and his
proxies. Trump told Fox news interviewers that Fauci had “made a lot of mistakes”
and said he “disagreed” with Fauci’s claim that the US was in a bad place in
its coronavirus response.
Described
as driven and a workaholic, Fauci had found himself in the uncomfortable
position of gently correcting Trump’s false or misleading statements for
months. As far back as April the president retweeted a call for him to be
fired, although that threat appeared to have receded.
In any
case, Trump cannot fire Fauci, who enjoys support on both sides of Congress and
has a public approval rating for his coronavirus response of 67% – almost three
times that of Trump’s. Instead the strategy appears aimed at damaging his
standing while keeping him out of the public eye by cancelling media
appearances.
In the
latest salvo of a coordinated briefing campaign, a White House official told
CNN on Saturday that “several White House officials are concerned about the
number of times Dr Fauci has been wrong on things”.
Fauci, who
has diplomatically navigated Trump’s often chaotic and sometimes bizarre
response to the pandemic, has long been the target of pro-Trump rightwing media
in the US, where he has been denounced as “Dr Doom” or accused of being
leftwing.
And having
originally been a prominent fixture of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences,
he is now markedly less visible.
His
influence on the White House too appears to be waning. According to the
Washington Post, quoting an unnamed White House official, Fauci last briefed
Trump in the first week of June.
Fauci has
had a long career in public health, and first came to prominence during the
Aids crisis. In recent weeks he has baldly contradicted Trump’s assessments
that the US is winning the fight against coronavirus, and criticised the
partisan political atmosphere that he suggests has impeded the response.
In an
interview for a podcast hosted by the FiveThirtyEight website last week he
delivered a damning assessment of the United States’s response to the pandemic
in comparison to other countries.
Conceding
that some cities and states such as New York had responded better than others,
Fauci said: “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t
think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.” He added that it
was “understandable” why the European Union and others had banned US citizens
from entering.
On the role
of America’s toxic political climate, he said: “You have to be having
blind-folders on and covering your ears to think that we don’t live in a very
divisive society now, from a political standpoint … So I think you’d have to
make the assumption that if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have
a more coordinated approach.”
Although
Fauci has been at odds with Trump publicly before – not least over the
president’s advocacy for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a Covid-19
treatment – his most recent interventions have strayed from the strictly scientific
field to the political.
In doing so
he has departed from what he has previously said is his guiding credo that “you
stay completely apolitical and non-ideological, and you stick to what it is
that you do. I’m a scientist and I’m a physician. And that’s it.”
The
pushback against Fauci continued on Sunday when Admiral Brett Giroir, the
Trump-appointed coronavirus testing tsar, told NBC that Fauci “is not 100%
right” and that he doesn’t necessarily “have the whole national interest in
mind”, adding that “he looks at it from a very narrow public health point of
view”.
Described
in a 2012 profile as “demanding and caustic with a dollop of charm”, Fauci has
long given the impression that, as a general rule, he does not suffer fools
gladly. Some of his colleagues told Science magazine in March that his approach
to the coronavirus would be to walk a fine line in “being honest to the public
and policymakers but not so openly critical that he loses influence by being
ignored or forced to resign”.
Increasingly
it appears that approach has collided with the reality of a president unwilling
to brook any criticism or dissent.
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