Fauci Says U.S. ‘Could Have Saved Lives’ With Earlier Action, Trump Clarifies He Has No Plans to Fire Fauci – What Do You Think?

Update - 6:30pm ET:

• Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, clarified remarks he made a day earlier, when he said the U.S. "could have saved lives" if it had introduced measures to stop Covid-19 earlier.
• "[T]he first and only time” that anyone “formally made a recommendation to the president” to encourage distancing, “the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation," Fauci said.
• Fauci insisted he’d used a “poor choice of words” when he suggested that earlier mitigation measures - which the president did not endorse - would have saved lives.
• He clarified that there was never a rift between him and President Trump:

• Later in the press briefing, Trump said, "I’m not firing him. No I like him. I think he’s terrific.” But he added:

“Not everybody is happy with Anthony. Not everybody is happy with everybody.”

Countable's original story appears below.

What's the story?

• The U.S. "could have saved lives" if it had introduced measures to stop Covid-19 earlier, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
• President Donald Trump, who has often been at odds with Fauci, signalled his disapproval for the interview by sharing a tweet about firing the health official, ending with the hashtag #FireFauci.
• However, just before we were about this article, the White House released a statement that Trump was not planning on firing Fauci:

"This media chatter is ridiculous – President Trump is not firing Dr. Fauci," said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. "Dr. Fauci has been and remains a trusted adviser to President Trump.”

What did Fauci say?

• In the third week of February, Fauci and other advisers drafted a list of measures they believed were necessary to stem the COVID-19 outbreak, including school closures, concert cancellations, and stay-at-home orders. The president, however, did not embrace any of these recommendations until mid-March.
• In an interview Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Fauci was asked what would have happened were the measures imposed during the third week of February instead of mid-March.
• "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," Fauci said.

"If we had, right from the beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different," Fauci told CNN on Sunday, but added that making that decision had been complicated.

What is Trump tweeting?

• The repost, from former GOP congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine, read:

“Fauci is now saying that had Trump listened to the medical experts earlier he could’ve saved more lives. 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.”

• While it's unclear what Trump meant in saying that he'd "banned China" (which he did not do), the president did block foreign nationals who had been in China in the past 14 days from entering the U.S. starting on Feb. 2.

What do you think?

Do you support efforts to #FireFauci? Should the U.S. have acted sooner to curb the spread of coronavirus? Take action above and tell your reps, then share your thoughts below.

—Josh Herman

(Photo Credit: The White House)