07/12/2020 - 14:01
- Clarín.com
- World
Despite his important role in the United States' fight against the coronavirus, leading infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci has been sidelined by the White House, The Washington Post reported .
Fauci "no longer reports to (US President) Trump and is no longer in the Oval (office)," the newspaper reported, citing a senior White House official, who requested anonymity.
According to the report, Fauci had not spoken to Trump since "the first week of June."
Since the emergence of COVID-19 in the United States, the Trump administration and especially the president himself have had strained relations with the scientist about the country's policy regarding the coronavirus.
In recent days, in the face of increasing coronavirus infections and deaths in most American states, Fauci, whose television appearances were allegedly "sabotaged" by the White House, had become more critical of the US response. country to the epidemic.
In an event broadcast live on Tuesday, Fauci warned against a "false narrative" of a drop in the COVID-19-related death rate, even as Trump continued to proclaim the supposed progress the United States had made in addressing the outbreak of COVID-19 citing a drop in the mortality rate in the country.
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Watch the specialIn another interview with The Hill on Thursday, Fauci said that US states heavily hit by the COVID-19 pandemic should not go ahead with the reopening, another public reprimand against Trump, which had repeatedly downplayed the exacerbation of the COVID outbreak. -19 in the country and encouraged states to quickly reopen their economies.
In recent days, the 79-year-old scientist and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been directly targeted by the president. During a Fox News interview Thursday with Sean Hannity, Trump said Fauci "is a good man, but he has made many mistakes . " And when asked by Greta Van Susteren last week about Fauci's assessment that the country was not in a good place, Trump flatly said, "I disagree with him."
For some administration officials, those statements have been a sign that their job was at stake. But Trump cannot directly fire Fauci, a career official with more than 50 years in government service who enjoys strong bipartisan support in Congress. In any case, the president has no plans to get rid of him, the official said.
As for Fauci himself, although he is frustrated by the state of the outbreak, his friends say he has no plans to leave his post, which includes a key role in the development of a vaccine and treatments against coronavirus, details The Washington Post .
Fauci has found other ways to get his message across, from online Facebook chats to podcasts and print media interviews. And in recent days, with coronavirus cases hitting hospitals in the south and west, he has been frankly critical of the United States' response, and implicitly, of the president.
“As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don't think you can say that we are doing well . I mean, we just are not, ”Fauci said in a podcast interview with FiveThirtyEight last week.
From the Trump administration a statement was issued saying that "several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong about things," and attached a long list of comments from the scientist since the beginning of the outbreak.
Source: Xinhua and Clarín