As the United States lurches toward record-high new coronavirus cases, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci had some startling pronouncements — notably, President Trump has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in several months.
Asked by MSNBC’s Chuck Todd when the last time Trump had attended a meeting with the task force was, Fauci replied: “At a task force meeting? That was several months ago, Chuck.” Fauci did confirm that Vice President Mike Pence continues to attend the meetings regularly and added that “the vice president makes our feelings and what we talk about there known” to Trump.
“But direct involvement with the president and discussions?” Fauci continued. “I have not done that in a while.”
Dr. Fauci says the last time President Trump has attended a coronavirus task force meeting was “several months ago.”
“Direct involvement with the president in the discussions? I have not done that in a while.” pic.twitter.com/UaingyDNGf
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 23, 2020
Fauci added that though he may no longer have the president’s attention, White House coronavirus adviser Scott Atlas does. “I definitely don’t have his ear as much as Scott Atlas right now,” Fauci said. “That has been a changing situation.”
Atlas’s role as an adviser was announced in August and was met with backlash from the medical community, given that, as a radiologist, he had no training in epidemiology or infectious disease, and public health experts feared that Atlas would replace Dr. Anthony Fauci on the coronavirus task force. Atlas was also recently censured by Twitter for tweeting that masks were not effective, contradicting data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization.
During his interview with MSNBC, Fauci also disclosed that the coronavirus task force has only been meeting once a week. “An official task force meeting, Chuck? In the last several weeks, there’s been about one per week,” he said.
Weekly meetings come at a time when the coronavirus continues to ripple across the U.S. — and resurge in areas that had already been hard hit. After the Northeast was hammered by the coronavirus in the spring, clusters and outbreaks rippled across the country, affecting Sunbelt and Midwestern states in the summer. Now there are spikes in the Upper Midwest in states such as Wisconsin, where for the first time, more than 1,000 were hospitalized with COVID-19, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
“Unfortunately, we are seeing a distressing trend here in the United States,” CDC Deputy Director for Infectious Diseases Jay Butler told reporters Wednesday, adding that cases are now growing “really in all parts of the country,” with especially high infection rates in Midwestern states.
Fauci and Trump have increasingly been at odds in their coronavirus messaging. Trump has repeatedly used Fauci’s old remarks about the coronavirus, such as saying that people didn’t need to wear masks at the beginning of the pandemic, in an effort to denigrate and delegitimize the health official. During a phone call with reporters, Trump said Fauci has been a “disaster” and claimed that if he had listened to all of the advice given to him from Fauci, “We’d have 500,000 deaths.”
“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” Trump said. “He’s been here for 500 years. … Every time he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. This guy’s a disaster.”
Fauci, for his part, has tried to remain apolitical. Fauci called the controversy a “distraction.” He said, “I would prefer not to comment on that and just get on with what we are really trying to do, and what we are trying to do is to protect the health and welfare and safety of the American people predominantly, and ultimately, of the world.”
“That other stuff, it’s like in The Godfather: Nothing personal, strictly business as far as I’m concerned,” Fauci said. “I just want to do my job and take care of the people of this country.”
