Dr. Anthony Fauci, left, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testifies before a House Oversight Committee hearing. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
13 March 20
According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, nearly everything the president has said about the coronavirus is wrong.
omething you may have noticed over the last three years is that Donald Trump’s
body apparently requires a certain amount of lies per minute to
function, in the same way that normal human bodies require oxygen.
Oftentimes these lies are dumb and meaningless, like when he claimed Ivanka created 14 million jobs or that he had a shot
with Princess Diana. Other times, they’re significantly more dangerous
like, say, when every other word out of his mouth re: a pandemic that
has killed over 4,000 people bears little resemblance to the truth.
While the president is used to his loyal footstools repeating such lies
for fear of offending him, on Wednesday, a member of his coronavirus
task force apparently had enough.
Speaking to lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Dr. Anthony Fauci,
the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious
Diseases, noted that attempts to downplay how lethal the disease is by
comparing it to the flu—which the president did just two days ago—are
wildly misguided. “I mean, people always say, ‘Well, the flu does this,
the flu does that,’” Fauci said. “The flu has a mortality of 0.1%. This
has a mortality of 10 times that. That’s the reason I want to emphasize
we have to stay ahead of the game in preventing this.”
Naturally, Trump’s attempt to use the flu to somehow
prove the novel coronavirus isn’t so bad have involved false stats, like
that the mortality rate for the flu is “much higher than” COVID-19, and
easily debunked lies like that a vaccine is just around the corner.
(“It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for,” he said
two weeks ago. “And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a
fairly quick manner.”)
While Fauci has repeatedly countered that the
actual expected timetable is 12 to 18 months, on Wednesday he was more
blunt in shutting down Trump’s fantasy timeline. “No,” he said when
asked if there was any merit to the president’s assertion that a vaccine
might be ready in just a few months.
“I made myself very clear in my opening statement.” Elsewhere, Fauci,
who has served under six presidents, generally took aim at Trump’s
assertion that everything is fine and that the virus will just “go away” on its own. Asked if the worst is yet to come, he responded unequivocally, “Yes, yes it is.”
The good news is that the federal government has
finally gotten its shit together, and by gotten its shit together we of
course mean can’t even say how many Americans have been tested for the virus:
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said Tuesday the department does not know how many Americans have been tested for coronavirus and suggested older Americans avoid large gatherings such as campaign rallies….
The availability of test kits to health care providers has been one of the most scrutinized aspects of the federal government's response to the crisis, leading to frustrations from state and local officials, and there has been confusion among Trump administration officials over the number of testing kits that have been mailed out.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, testing revealed
that COVID-19 “can live in the air for several hours and on some
surfaces for as long as two to three days.” It’s not clear how long the
administration has been aware of such information, but perhaps it came
up in one of the meetings the White House has reportedly
ordered classified, an “unusual” step that CNBC notes “has restricted
information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the
contagion.”
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