The media is freaking out because Dr. Anthony Fauci seemed to imply during an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper that President Trump could have "saved lives" if he had ordered lockdowns earlier than he did. Well it turns out that one of the leading voices downplaying the threat of Coronavirus in January and February was...Dr. Anthony Fauci.
On Newsmax TV's "Greg Kelly Reports" on January 21st, host Greg Kelly asked Dr. Fauci directly whether Americans had to worry about this new disease in China.
"Well, you know, obviously, you need to take it seriously and do the kinds of things that the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security are doing," Fauci responded. "But this is not a major threat for the people of the United States, and this is not something that the citizens of the United States right now should be worried about."
Two days later, Dr. Fauci appeared on the Journal of the American Medical Association podcast and noted that the United States at the time only had five cases, and each was in a travel-related case.
"We handled it properly," he insisted. "Fortunately, there have not been secondary cases."
Three days after that, while appearing on the CATS Roundtable podcast, Fauci was even more blunt in his assessment:
"The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It's a very, very low risk to the United States," he said. "It isn't something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about."
Five days later, on January 31st, President Trump implemented a travel ban on China, which seems to imply that he was taking the threat to Americans more seriously than even Dr. Fauci was. A full month later, on February 29th, Dr. Fauci told the TODAY Show that there was no need for Americans to change their daily habits because of the Coronavirus.
“Dr. Fauci, it’s Saturday morning in America," asked anchor Peter Alexander. "People are waking up right now with real concerns about this; they want to go to malls and movies, maybe the gym as well. Should we be changing our habits, and if so, how?”
"No," Fauci responded. "Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis. Right now the risk is still low, but this could change; I’ve said that many times, even on this program. You’ve gotta watch out because although the risk is low now, you don’t need to change anything that you’re doing. When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive to doing things that would protect you from spread."
As recently as March 10th, Dr. Fauci was still insisting that the risk to Americans was low.
"If you look at the totality of the country, the risk is relatively low of getting infected," he told National Public Radio. "But if you are infected and you are an individual who falls into the category of having underlying conditions, such as heart disease, lung disease, diabetes, immunosuppression for cancer and other types of diseases, then if you get infected, your vulnerability for getting a complication is high. So what we're doing in society is to try and protect those individuals."
None of this is to suggest that Dr. Fauci bears responsibility for the severity of this outbreak. In truth, he was merely working with what in hindsight we know to be dishonest data from China. And he most certainly did not, as the media suggests, suggest to Jake Tapper on Sunday that President Trump bears any responsibility for not ordering lockdowns earlier.
"Do you think lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, stay-at-home measures, had started the third week of February instead of mid-March?" Tapper asked.
"You know, Jake, again, it’s the 'what would have, what could have'" Fauci answered. "It’s very difficult to go back and say that. 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."
Fauci was rather obviously saying that the threat in February, January, and even in early March did not warrant such drastic actions and looking back at the decisions now with the benefit of hindsight is a fruitless endeavor, but the media is running with the "Fauci blames Trump" narrative anyway.
It's just as shameful as the lie that President Trump was ignoring health experts like Fauci. In reality, he was following their lead.