President Trump criticized Dr. Anthony Fauci, the administration’s top infectious disease expert, in discussing the rise in new coronavirus cases.
“Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” Trump said in an appearance on Fox News Thursday night.
Coronavirus cases have spiked in Southern states since the beginning of June, oftentimes surpassing records for daily new cases. Fauci said Thursday that states experiencing renewed surges, many of which reopened before June, “should seriously look at shutting down.”
Trump said that Fauci and others on his coronavirus task force had discouraged him from instituting travel bans on people coming from China and Europe “when Italy and when France and Spain were having all the problems,” adding that the measures likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
[Read more: Anthony Fauci says he hasn’t briefed Trump on COVID-19 for two months]
“They’ve been wrong about a lot of things, including face masks,” Trump said, referring to public health officials in his administration. “Maybe they’re wrong, maybe not, but a lot of them said, ‘Don’t wear a mask, don’t wear a mask,’ and now they’re saying, ‘Wear a mask.’ So a lot of mistakes were made.”
Early in the pandemic, Surgeon General Jerome Adams implored people to stop wearing masks so that healthcare workers would have greater access to personal protective equipment in the national stockpile, which was nearly depleted by the peak of the pandemic in April. Fauci reiterated the surgeon general’s pleas more than once and told Congress in June that he was not intentionally misguiding people about the efficacy of wearing masks, but that he wanted healthcare workers to have access to critical supplies.
Trump has been reluctant to wear a face mask in public, but told Sean Hannity on Thursday that it’s “fine to wear a mask.” He maintained that he doesn’t have to wear one because he is tested for the coronavirus daily and is safe from infection.
He will go to Walter Reed Medical Center over the weekend to visit wounded members of the military and their families, and he said he would wear a mask, adding that he “has no problem with masks, but it’s got to be done at the right time.”
“I think it’s fine to wear a mask if it makes you feel comfortable, I think under certain conditions, like when you’re going into a hospital … I expect to be wearing a mask when I go into Walter Reed in a hospital setting, I think it’s a very appropriate thing, I have no problem with it,” he said.
Trump added, “I don’t think you need one when you’re tested all the time, everybody around you is tested, you’re quite a distance.”
As of Friday morning, more than 3.1 million people in the United States have been infected with COVID-19, and at least 133,290 people have died.
