Former White House Chief Medical Advisor Anthony Fauci, in a new interview, blamed former President Trump’s team for feeding him misinformation and becoming “furious” about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fauci, who spent his career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and served in the Trump and Biden administrations, has become the face of the United States’ response to the pandemic.
In recent years, he has become an enemy of the right after countering Trump’s baseless claims about the virus and urging Americans to get vaccinated.
In Friday’s interview with former Washington Post journalist Rick Atkinson, speaking at the Lincoln Theater, Fauci said he and Trump sometimes got along “really well.” But, he added, when stay-at-home and social distancing orders were initially imposed in March 2020, the former president complied, hoping “understandably but not realistically” that it would be flu-like and “go away.” like magic.”
“And I was saying, you know, it’s not,” the doctor said, adding that the disagreement took place in front of the press.
Fauci noted that he refused to agree that the virus would disappear quickly, “because that is not the nature of this disease.”
“We have to accept this. It’s a different disease,” he said.
But, the doctor continued, Trump “didn’t seem to be that upset with me, but his team gradually started to get mad at me for doing this.”
After the former president claimed that hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat the symptoms of malaria, would fight COVID-19 and Fauci publicly rejected the argument, he said the White House team began “trying to discredit everything that I said”.
“And the White House communications team did something, which White House people told me about, the first time they did opposition research on one of their own staffers,” he argued.
Fauci’s comments came during an event at the Lincoln Theater where he discussed his new book “On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service.”
In a recent appearance before Congress, Fauci became emotional as he spoke about the harassment and death threats he and his family continue to face to this day. It was the first time he addressed lawmakers since he retired nearly 18 months ago.
And in a late-night talk show interview earlier this week, Fauci said he wasn’t trying to take down Trump by diverting messages related to the pandemic because he has “great respect” for the office of the presidency.
But he said he had to contradict the former president “because he was saying things that were not correct.”
Joseph Choi contributed.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
