Dr. Anthony Fauci is expected to issue a stark warning against reopening the United States too soon during his testimony before a Senate panel on the Trump administration’s coronavirus response.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is set to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Tuesday, during which he plans to argue that the country would experience “needless suffering and death” if people start returning to work and school too early.
“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” he wrote in an email to the New York Times on Monday. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”
Many states across the nation have begun reopening their economies amid signs that the pandemic may be subsiding. Some that are moving ahead with plans to reopen, however, have not met the federal recommendation of having a downward trajectory in coronavirus cases for 14 days before starting the reopening process.
In addition to Fauci, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, and coronavirus testing coordinator Brett Giroir will also testify during the hearing. All four officials will attend the hearing via a videoconference because some of them are self-quarantining after exposure to COVID-19-positive White House employees.
Tuesday’s hearing will be the first appearance of such from Fauci since March, when he told the House Oversight Committee that the U.S. was “failing” on coronavirus testing. So far, the U.S. had recorded more than 1.3 million cases of COVID-19 and nearly 81,000 deaths.
