Former President Donald Trump has faced significant criticism during the last year of his presidency for his response to the pandemic, which has often strayed from the guidance of health officials in his own government and has often strayed into bizarre territory.
Since the early stages of the pandemic, Trump has regularly minimized the risk that Covid-19 posed to Americans and often predicted that the U.S. would soon have the virus defeated, even as cases increased across the country. He resisted the best practices recommended by his own public health team, refusing to wear a mask in public and holding large-scale demonstrations, both internal and external, with thousands of supporters.
Trump often praised the hydroxychloroquine malaria drug as a treatment for Covid-19, although there is no evidence of its effectiveness. At one point last spring, he suggested that Americans should inject disinfectants to fight the virus.
Fauci’s regular appearances at coronavirus briefings at the White House made him a household name during the pandemic, but his relationship with Trump quickly went sour when the NIAID chief refused to follow the inconsistent and sometimes dangerous rhetoric of the then Covid-19. president. Trump called Fauci an idiot and a “disaster”, saying “if we listened to him, we would have 700,000 [or] 800,000 deaths. ”Trump accused Fauci and other health officials of exaggerating the seriousness of the pandemic and criticized officials for saying early on that masks were not necessary.
As the pandemic progressed, Fauci’s appearances in the White House became increasingly rare, as did the contact between the two men.
Fauci said at a news conference with White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday that his work with the Biden government has so far been “liberating”. Fauci said the Trump administration prevented him from making some media appearances and that the White House hampered the flow of public health information.
“You didn’t feel that you could really say anything and that there would be no repercussions for that,” Fauci said at a news conference on Thursday. “One of the news in this government is that if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess. Just say that you don’t know the answer. ”
Fauci said in an interview on Thursday that there is “total transparency” under the Biden government.
On CNN Friday, he also said that there was a coronavirus strategy under the Trump administration, but that it “was not well articulated”.
“The separation between the federal government and the states … was really an injury,” Fauci told CNN. “You don’t want the federal government to do everything and you don’t want the states to do everything. … What we saw a lot was saying ‘OK states, do what you want to do.’ And states were doing things that were clearly not the right direction. ”
Biden’s Covid-19 strategy included directing FEMA to establish links with Covid-19 to “maximize cooperation between the federal government and states” and reimburse states for using the National Guard in relief efforts.
“The best thing to do is to have a plan, to make the federal government interact with the states in a synergistic, collaborative, cooperative way, assisting them with resources and assisting them in planning, while respecting the individual issues that any individual state may have, ”said Fauci.