Former President Donald Trump released a lengthy, directed attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx after the doctors’ recent interviews shined a new unflattering light on Trump’s White House during the COVID-19 pandemic. Laced with personal attacks, Trump calls the health officials “self-promoters” and “incapable.”
“Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned,” Trump said his statement. “They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine — putting millions of lives at risk.”
In his original interview, Fauci said “to go all out and develop a vaccine” was “the best decision that I’ve ever made with regard to an intervention as director of the institute.”
Trump’s statement later said, “Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move it through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this.” Trump’s statement baffled health officials – Fauci is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, not the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), meaning he has no authority to “pressure” the FDA.
In his interview, Fauci lamented that Trump’s social media posts regularly ran opposite of CDC and NIAID guidelines. “The thing that hit me like a punch to the chest was then all of a sudden he got up and says, ‘Liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan,’ and I said to myself, ‘Oh my goodness, what is going on here?’ It shocked me because it was such a jolt to what we were trying to do.”
“Time has proven me correct,” Trump said closing off his statement. “I only kept Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx on because they worked for the U.S. government for so long — they are like a bad habit!”
