Fauci confirms New York Times report Trump rebuffed social distancing

Prominent US public health adviser Dr Anthony Fauci appeared on Sunday to confirm a bombshell New York Times report which said he and other Trump administration officials recommended the implementation of physical distancing to combat the coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month. Asked on CNN’s State of the Union why the administration did not act when he and other officials advised, Fauci said: “You know … as I have said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint. We make a recommendation. Often, the recommendation is taken. Sometimes, it’s not.“…It is what it is. We are where we are right now.”More than 530,000 cases of Covid-19 have been confirmed in the US, with almost 21,000 deaths. Officials currently expect a death toll of about 60,000 by August. CNN host Jake Tapper asked if Fauci thought “lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, stay-at-home measures had started [in the] third week of February, instead of mid-March”. There was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then“It’s very difficult to go back and say that,” Fauci said. “I mean, obviously, you could logically say, that if you had a process that was ongoing, and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.“But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.”Since the White House issued physical distancing guidelines on 16 March, much of the US has gone into lockdown, shuttering the economy and leading to unprecedented and potentially ruinous unemployment. Chafing against such conditions in an election year, Donald Trump has voiced an eagerness to reopen the economy as early as 1 May. The president has also said he will listen to advisers if they counsel against such a move. On Sunday, Fauci, other experts and governors of hard-hit states were skeptical. Phil Murphy, governor of New Jersey, the state with the highest death toll after New York, told CBS’s Face the Nation: “If we start to get back on our feet too soon … we could be throwing gasoline on the fire.”No White House briefing was scheduled on Sunday but Trump continued to attack the Times and its article, in one tweet appearing inadvertently to confirm it, writing: “the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat’.”Trump also claimed vindication regarding his “travel ban” on China. One of his most vocal supporters in the US media, Fox News host Sean Hannity, followed suit.“Hey [Maggie Haberman],” Hannity tweeted, to one of six reporters on the byline of Saturday’s report. “…You should Thank [Trump] for the Travel Ban(s) put in place while you and [the New York Times] were fixated on

All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/12/fauci-trump-rebuffed-social-distancing-advice-coronavirus#img-1

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Fauci confirms New York Times report Trump rebuffed social distancing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8IzlMQ5tMA