President Donald Trump might have just publicly signaled his dissatisfaction with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci on Sunday. The POTUS retweeted a call to fire Dr. Fauci after the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus had the country shut down sooner.
Donald Trump retweeted a message by a former Republican congressional candidate that said “Time to #FireFauci” after the doctor said on national television that more lives could have been saved if the country shut down sooner, according to the NY Times. The publication added that the President has been privately irritated at times with Dr. Fauci but his social media post is the “most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.”
“Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives,” reads the original tweet by former Republican congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine. “Fauci was telling people on February 29th that there was nothing to worry about and it posed no threat to the US at large. Time to #Fire Fauci.”
Trump said in his retweet that Lorraine’s message is fake news. “Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape,” the POTUS captioned his retweet. “I banned China long before people spoke up.”
On Sunday, Dr. Fauci expressed that had the mitigation been started earlier, it would have saved more lives. As of April 13, 2020, coronavirus infections claimed 22,105 lives in the U.S., based on data from Worldometers. There are a total of 560,300 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country.
“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,” Dr. Fauci said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “Obviously, no one is going to deny that. But what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. 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.”
President Donald Trump blamed the media for the negative publicity circulating around. “If the Fake News Opposition Party is pushing, with all their might, the fact that President Trump ‘ignored early warnings about the threat,’ then why did Media & Dems viciously criticize me when I instituted a Travel Ban on China? They said ‘early & not necessary.’ Corrupt Media!” the President tweeted on Sunday.