The country's leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has spoken in recent days with the media about the great difficulties he faced in his professional and private life during the Trump Administration, including this Sunday the revelation that
his family and he received death threats
.
“It was the harassment of my wife, and particularly my children, that bothered me more than anything else.
They knew where my children worked, where they lived.
The threats came directly to their phones, directly to their homes, "Fauci said this Sunday in an interview with
The New York Times
.
[Follow our coverage on the coronavirus pandemic]
The new Administration's main medical adviser to the pandemic team added that there were threatening conversations on the internet, “
We have to get rid of this guy
.
What are we going to do with it?
It is damaging the possibilities of the president ”, he assured that they said about him.
Although he never suffered a direct confrontation, Fauci said that one day he received an envelope full of dust.
Upon testing, it turned out to be benign.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, January 21, 2021.REUTERS
"It was terrifying,"
confessed the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for almost 40 years.
He never knew if Trump was aware of the episode that was investigated by the FBI.
Since the Joe Biden Administration started, Fauci has made evident the tensions that existed with the previous Administration.
“There was a constant pressure that sometimes
the truth was going to be upsetting for some
.
Not necessarily for the president but, including him, for some people close to him, "he assured on Saturday in an interview with our sister network MSNBC.
Just a few days ago, Fauci assured that it is
liberating to
have the support of a government that ensures that "science will always be at the forefront" of its decisions.
"The idea that you can stop here and talk about what you know, what the evidence is, what science says, and not 'that's it' [...] It is something like a liberating feeling," he said. .
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, laughs while speaking in the James Brady Press Room at the White House, Thursday, January 21, 2021, in Washington, DC.
AP / Alex Brandon
At that press conference, Fauci acknowledged that it was sometimes difficult to work with Trump, who repeatedly downplayed the severity of the pandemic.
“I always said everything to the letter, that's why
sometimes I got into trouble
[...] It is clear that there were things that were said, either regarding hydroxychloroquine and other things like that, that were really uncomfortable because they were not based on scientific facts, "he said.
He also confessed that he did not like "at all" having to contradict the president.
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Under the new Administration, Fauci committed to being "completely
transparent, open and honest
."
"If things go wrong, we are not going to point the finger, but correct them and that everything we do is based on
science and evidence,
" he reiterated.
Deborah Birx says there were "parallel" data on COVID-19
Dr. Deborah Birx assured CBS this Sunday that when she was coordinator of the working group on the coronavirus of former president, Donald Trump, she had to deal with the COVID-19 deniers in the White House and that someone gave the president flows of "parallel" data that conflicted with yours.
Birx said she was sometimes censored by the Trump Administration
, but denied withholding information.
He claimed that Trump showed "graphs that I never did" and that "someone outside or someone inside was creating a parallel set of data and graphs that were shown to the president."
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Birx did not identify the COVID-19 deniers and said he did not know who was submitting the parallel data to Trump, but now realizes that Trump's coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas was providing some of it.
With information from The New York Times, AP and MSNBC.
