Scientists and doctors raced to defend Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday, accusing the White House of taking remarks out of context to smear the country’s leading infectious diseases expert.
They said accusations that he was wrong about the asymptomatic spread of the novel coronavirus, its threat to health, or the value of masks ignored how understanding of a new disease had changed over the past six months.
Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said, “It’s bizarre to use political opposition methods on a scientist, who is speaking in full sentences. It is taking things out of context to undermine the credibility of one of the nation’s top scientists.”
Fauci has frequently been at odds with White House officials, taking a more skeptical tone about the efforts to fight the disease, even as President Trump pushed for the country to reopen rapidly.
Over the weekend, White House officials distributed a list of examples they said showed how Fauci “has been wrong on things” in his past assessments of the coronavirus.
They included doubts that asymptomatic carriers could spread the disease, that masks should not be worn by the public, and that played down the threat from the novel coronavirus.
The points were backed up with television appearances.
Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that Fauci was “a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”
And Brett Giroir, a health and human services official and member of the White House coronavirus task force, pushed back at Fauci’s latest recommendation that states suffering a surge in cases should shut down again.
“I respect Dr. Fauci a lot, but Dr. Fauci is not 100% right, and he also doesn’t necessarily, and he admits that, have the whole national interest in mind,” he told Meet The Press on Sunday.
The administration’s social media director Dan Scavino posted a cartoon of “Dr. Faucet” to his Facebook account, showing him as leaking sink and accusing him of “cowardly” leaks.
The attacks infuriated many scientists and public health experts who concluded a smear campaign was being conducted to silence a dissenting voice.
Instead, they said that Fauci had been expressing early scientific consensus, based on understanding of other coronaviruses, and had frequently qualified his statements by adding that COVID-19 might be different.
On Jan. 28, when he said that “an epidemic is not driven by asymptomatic carriers,” he added that he was talking about historical trends.
So even if there was “asymptomatic transmission, in all the history of respiratory-borne viruses of any type, asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks. The driver of outbreaks is always a symptomatic person.”
“They are taking him out of context,” said Sharfstein.
Dr. Katherine Seley-Radtke, professor of medical chemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an expert on coronaviruses, said much of the public misunderstood how science worked. It was not a body of proven facts as much as a process designed to inform understanding of the world.
“We base things on research and what we know about particular disease, a virus,” she said.
“That knowledge evolves as you learn more about the disease. I don’t think it’s fair to say he was wrong. He may be wrong now, but at the time he was right.”
Last week, Fauci told the Financial Times he had not briefed the president on the coronavirus in the past two months. And he said his reputation for not “sugar-coating things” may have seen his TV appearances limited by officials.
The result is concern that the White House is embarked on an effort to deflect attention from its response as the number of new cases reaches record levels.
Dr. Peter Hotez, director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, said: “What is unfolding is a deliberate misinformation campaign. It’s statements by the White House that 99% of the cases are harmless, which is absolutely not true, that the hospital admissions are due to increasing elective surgeries, which is absolutely not true, it’s deflections blaming Chinese Communist Party conspiracies,” he told the BBC World Service.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the briefing information was supplied in response to a question from reporters and that Fauci and the president had a good working relationship.
“We provided a direct response to a direct question, and that’s about it,” she said. “The notion that there’s opposition research and that there’s Fauci versus the president couldn’t be further from the truth.”
Sharfstein said he thought the effort could undermine future messaging that may need to rely on scientific expertise. But he said Fauci’s high public standing would make it difficult to damage his credibility.
“I don’t think it will be successful,” he said. “It is the president and vice president who have been grossly wrong at multiple times about what has been happening in this country.”
