NEW YORK | Nothing goes between the White House and the immunologist Anthony Fauci, coordinator of the fight against infectious diseases in the United States, this opposition having spread in broad daylight Saturday and Sunday.
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The respected expert criticized the Trump administration’s strategy for managing the resurgence of the coronavirus, which earned him a counterattack from the White House, which accuses him of wanting to weaken the presidential candidate.
Long the most prominent advisor to the Head of State on the pandemic, Dr Fauci said in an interview with Washington post, published on Saturday, that the United States could not be “worse positioned” to deal with the accelerating number of COVID-19 cases.
“We are going to suffer,” warned the one who is also director of the Institute of Infectious Diseases. “The situation is not good. “
He indicated that Donald Trump no longer took his advice and now preferred the neuroradiologist Scott Atlas, in favor of a broad reopening of American society rather than a strengthening of preventive measures.
“Suddenly, they no longer wanted to listen to our message, because it did not correspond to what they wanted to do,” says the one who says he has not spoken to the president for several weeks.
Anthony Fauci noted a clear difference between the White House’s approach and that of Democratic candidate Joe Biden, who “takes (the pandemic) seriously from a public health perspective.”
A member of the White House communications team, Judd Deere found Dr Fauci’s comments “unacceptable”.
For him, the doctor “sprains all uses (…) by choosing, three days before an election, to play politics”.
Scott Atlas, highly contested by the scientific and public health community, has for his part had to apologize for giving an interview to the Russian state channel RT, considered by many Western states as a weapon of Russian propaganda abroad.
Washington had forced the RT group to register three years ago as a “foreign agent”, considering it an organ of the Kremlin, itself regularly suspected by American intelligence of maneuvers aimed at destabilizing the presidential election in the United States.
“I regret having given this interview and I apologize for allowing myself to be deceived. I especially apologize to the intelligence services, ”Atlas tweeted.
The United States on Friday recorded a record new cases of coronavirus in 24 hours, at more than 94,000, and nearly 1,000 deaths on that day alone.
In mid-October, during a conference call, Donald Trump had called Anthony Fauci a “disaster” and had included him in a group of scientists in favor of a cautious approach to the pandemic, “idiots”, according to the president.