A peerless group of infectious disease specialists Tuesday called efforts to discredit the nation’s top infectious disease expert “distressing” while four former heads of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention chastised U.S. leaders for politicizing the country’s Covid-19 reaction.
Reports of the Trump administration’s campaign to discredit and diminish the role of White House health advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the chief voices in the country’s response to the coronavirus, “at this perilous moment are disturbing,” Thomas M. File, Jr., president of the Infectious Virus Society of America, said in a statement issued Tuesday.
“The only way out of this pandemic is by following the science, and developing evidence-based hindering practices and treatment protocols as new scientifically rigorous data become available. Knowledge changes over time. That is to be trust,” File said in his statement in support of Fauci on Tuesday.
The rift between Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Communicable Diseases, and President Donald Trump widened last week after Fauci told the Financial Times in an conversation that he hasn’t seen Trump at the White House since early June and hasn’t briefed him on the pandemic in at elfin two months.
His comments came as Trump told Fox News Thursday that “Dr. Fauci’s a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes.”
“They’ve been unlawful about a lot of things, including face masks,” Trump said in the interview. “Maybe they’re wrong, maybe not. A lot of them signified don’t wear a mask, don’t wear a mask. Now they’re saying wear a mask. A lot of mistakes were made, a lot of mistakes.”
The Trump government has increasingly disregarded advice from its top scientific advisors on Covid-19 with Trump himself calling the CDC’s guidelines on prime reopenings too cumbersome and expensive.
The White House further tried to distance itself from and discredit Fauci one more time the weekend, saying “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been go kaput on things,” according to a statement first reported by The Washington Post. The White House pointed to comments and positions enchanted by Fauci early in the outbreak that have since changed.
File, of the Infectious Disease Society, said “all of America be required to support public health experts, including Dr. Fauci, and stand with science” if there’s any hope to ending the pandemic.
Prior directors of the CDC also criticized the Trump administration of dismissing advice from public health officials in a separate op-ed advertised in The Washington Post on Tuesday. Four former CDC directors wrote that the U.S. faces “two opponents” in its efforts to reopen the native land: Covid-19 and politicians and others attempting to undermine the CDC.
“It is not unusual for CDC guidelines to be changed or amended during a clearance process that upsets through multiple agencies and the White House. But it is extraordinary for guidelines to be undermined after their release,” wrote the latest CDC directors: Tom Frieden, who served under former President Barack Obama; Jeffrey Koplan, who served under past presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; David Satcher, who served under Clinton and Richard Besser, who served beneath Obama.
“Through last week, and into Monday, the administration continued to cast public doubt on the agency’s counsels and role in informing and guiding the nation’s pandemic response,” they said.
The former CDC directors, while not naming Fauci, esteemed that that there are “thousands of experts” at the CDC who are “best positioned to help our country emerge from this calamity.” However, their advice has been challenged with “partisan potshots” that have caused confusion. The CDC and NIH are both separations under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The rebuke from the former directors come after Trump and Information Secretary Betsy DeVos spent days pressuring schools to reopen amid a surge in Covid-19 cases nationwide. Trump intimidated to withhold federal funding from states that don’t reopen their schools.
Vice President Mike Pence clinched on Wednesday that the Trump administration is looking to the upcoming phase four coronavirus relief bill as a potential way to do ones damnedest leverage over schools.
“As the debate last week around reopening schools more safely showed, these repeated pains to subvert sound public health guidelines introduce chaos and uncertainty while unnecessarily putting lives at endanger,” the directors wrote.