Former President Donald Trump received considerable criticism during the last year of his presidency for his pandemic response, which often deviated from the leadership of his own administration’s health officials and often threatened in a bizarre area.
From the early stages of the pandemic, Trump has regularly downplayed the risk Covid-19 poses to Americans, regularly predicting that the U.S. would soon allow the virus to succeed, even if the country caught the country’s attention. He resists the best practices recommended by his own public health team, refuses to wear a mask in public, and holds large-scale gatherings, indoors and outdoors, with thousands of supporters.
Trump regularly considered the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid-19, although there was no evidence that it was effective. Last spring, he suggested that Americans inject disinfectants to fight the virus.
Fauci’s frequent appearance during the Coronavirus briefings in the White House made him a household name throughout the pandemic, but his relationship with Trump accelerated rapidly as the NIAID chief refused to comply with the then president’s contradictory and sometimes dangerous Covid-19 rhetoric to fall. Trump calls Fauci an idiot and a ‘disaster’ and says’ if we listen to him we will have 700,000 [or] 800,000 deaths. Trump accused Fauci and other health officials of exaggerating the severity of the pandemic and criticized officials for saying early on that masks were not needed.
As the pandemic escalated, Fauci’s appearance in the White House became increasingly rare, as did contact between the two men.
Fauci told a news conference with White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Thursday that his work with the Biden government had been ‘liberating’ so far. Fauci said the Trump administration had prevented him from making media appearances and that the White House was obstructing the flow of public health information.
“You did not feel you could say anything, and there would be no consequences,” Fauci told the news conference on Thursday. ‘One of the new things in this administration is that you do not guess if you do not know the answer. Just say you do not know the answer. ‘
Fauci said in an interview on Thursday that there is “complete transparency” under Biden’s government.
On CNN Friday, he also said that there was a coronavirus strategy under the Trump administration, but that it was “not well articulated.”
“The separation of the federal government and the states … was really a scandal,” Fauci told CNN. “You do not want the federal government to do everything, and you do not want the states to do everything. … What we saw a lot was to say ‘OK state, do what you want to do.’ And states did things that were clearly not the right direction. ”
Biden’s Covid-19 strategy included ordering FEMA to establish Covid-19 links to ‘maximize cooperation between the federal government and the states’ and to compensate states for the use of the National Guard in assistance .
‘The best thing to do is to have a plan, to let the federal government interact with the states in a synergistic, cooperative and collaborative way, to help them with resources and to help them with a plan, at the same time with respect to the individual issues that individual state may have, ”Fauci said.