Fauci: "I'm Not Trying To Undermine The President. But There Is Something That's Called Reality."

Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Washington Post last Friday that if the United States doesn't make an "abrupt change" in public health practices and behaviours, it will be heading into a long and potentially deadly winter.

We're in for a whole lot of hurt. It's not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.

Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last spring the US could surpass 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day - and the US topped 101,000 the day of the Post interview. 

Infections are increasing in at least 42 states and Donald Trump is publicly whining on a daily basis that the media is paying more attention to the virus than to him. He is a petulant little child banging his wooden blocks on the floor to get his parents' attention.

Fauci said Joe Biden's campaign "is taking it seriously from a public health perspective". In one of the more diplomatic statements I've read in a long time, he said Trump is "looking at it from a different perspective". Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said Fauci's comments were "unacceptable" and he criticized Fauci for "choos[ing] three days before an election to play politics".

In another recent interview, Fauci said:

I'm walking a fine line of being someone who is not hesitant to tell the president and the vice president what they may not want to hear. . . . That's when I got that nickname 'the skunk at the picnic.' . . . I'm not trying to undermine the president. But there is something that's called reality.

Fauci called the daily number of cases as winter approaches "extremely high and quite unacceptable". While some people have called this recent surge a "third wave", Fauci said the US is still struggling with the first wave.

We never got out of the real wave. We kind of went up and down within a wave. When I hear people talk about second and third waves, it really is the original wave that just resurges up, comes down a little, and resurges up again.

Fauci expressed disappointed that Trump regularly meets with only one medical adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no experience in infectious diseases.

I have real problems with that guy. . . . [He's] talking about things that I believe he doesn't have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn't make any sense.

Atlas is a proponent of "herd immunity", which Trump has referred to as "herd mentality". Fauci said if the US opted for herd immunity, "the death toll would be enormous". In mid-October, William Haseltine, Chair and President of ACCESS Health International, told CNN:

Herd immunity is another word for mass murder. . . . [If the virus is allowed to spread] we are looking at two to six million Americans dead – not just this year but every year. This is an unmitigated disaster for our country – to have people at the highest levels of our government countermanding our best public health officials. We know this epidemic can be put under control. Other countries have done it. We are doing the opposite.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN) said recently that 60-70% of the population would have to become infected. "We know that with around 10% of the country that's become infected, 216,000 people have died, roughly. So, just do the math there."

Trump called Fauci an "idiot" earlier this month and has claimed (without explanation or evidence or any connection to reality) that if he had followed the advice of the country's most-knowledgeable infectious disease expert, a man with 50 years of experience, between 500,000 and 800,000 Americans would be dead (more than two or three times the currently reported death toll).

People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots, all these people that have gotten it wrong. Fauci is a nice guy. He's been here for 500 years. He called every one of them wrong.

On September 18, Trump said he knows more than the experts at the CDC. "Yeah, in many cases I do."

There is no hope for someone like that.

Trump is strongly hinting he will fire Fauci after the election, when he won't have to even pretend to care that his stubborn idiocy and deliberate inaction is causing thousands of Americans to die each week.

Crowd chants “Fire Fauci” during Pres. Trump’s campaign rally in South Florida: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little a bit after the election,” the president says in response. “I appreciate the advice.” https://t.co/rlgU1dKT2A pic.twitter.com/Mqa2RwbP3i

— ABC News (@ABC) November 2, 2020