“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,” Fauci, said on “State of the Union” when asked if social distancing and stay-at-home measures could have prevented deaths had they been put in place in February, instead of mid-March.
“Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those decisions is complicated,” added Fauci, who is a key member of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force. “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.”
CNN has reached out to the White House for additional comment about Trump’s retweet.
In meetings, Fauci isn’t hesitant to offer unvarnished thoughts or analysis even when it seems to contradict the President. He’s previously warned the speed of developing a coronavirus vaccine isn’t nearly where Trump has suggested it could be and he’s cautioned that the possible treatments Trump touts in public haven’t yet proved effective.
Frank public disagreements between Trump and a top official are virtually unprecedented in his administration. Earlier in the crisis, Trump grew enraged when an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggested the situation would worsen badly in the United States, believing her assessment overly fatalistic.
Blunt candor hasn’t always endeared Fauci to Trump either; the President has complained in private when it seems he’s being contradicted by the nation’s top infectious disease specialist. But Trump has also said he prefers the direct approach.
“OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time,” Fauci said.
Allies push to discredit experts
As conversations intensify in the White House about how and when to give guidance to reopen the country, the President is talking more and more to friends from Wall Street, hedge fund managers and others in the financial world pressuring him to put a specific date on the calendar for when businesses can reopen — and to do it soon, according to a person familiar with the President’s conversations.
Meanwhile, the President’s allies in conservative media have begun waging a campaign to discredit some on his team as narrowly focused on charts and models rather than the economic pain inflicted on millions of Americans.
Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host whom Trump awarded a surprise Medal of Freedom during this year’s State of the Union address, called Fauci a “Clinton sympathizer” on his program last week. Tucker Carlson, whose intervention in early March helped Trump take the outbreak more seriously, said on his Fox program Fauci had been “wrong repeatedly.”
When Trump initially decided Easter was the date he hoped to have the country open again, it caught some aides off guard and was not based on any data-focused discussions.
Officials, realizing it was unrealistic, slowly tried to get the President to back off that timeline by showing him models that projected thousands of dead and polling that showed Americans favored keeping the restrictions back in place.
“That was just an aspiration. That would have been incredible,” Trump said last week. “But I don’t think we’re going to be very far behind.”
Now, there is no similarly concerted effort underway to convince Trump to ease up on the May timeline for reopening the country, people familiar with the matter said.