Fauci: ‘I think you can trust me’ on my track record
Anthony Fauci said the public can trust him when he provides guidance on the coronavirus based on his track record as he comes under increasingly public attacks from some administration officials.
“I believe, for the most part, you can trust respected medical authorities,” Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said Tuesday during a Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service event. “I believe I’m one of them, so I think you can trust me.”
Fauci was responding to a question regarding who the public should trust when looking for guidance regarding safe practices during the pandemic as officials and the White House give conflicting messages over the seriousness of recent spikes in COVID-19 cases across the country.
“I would stick with respected medical authorities who have a track record of telling the truth, who have a track record of giving information and policy and recommendations based on scientific evidence and good data,” he said. “So if I were to give advice to you and your family and your friends and your family, I would say that’s the safest bet to do, to listen to the recommendations from that category of people.
“But it’s entirely understandable how the public can get mixed messages and then get a bit confused about what they should do,” he added.
The remarks come as President Trump and other officials air grievances with Fauci, who has adopted a far more cautious approach to the coronavirus than many officials have advocated for, raising competing messages over school closures and the rate at which states should reopen.
Trump this week shared a Twitter post accusing doctors and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of “lying” in order to influence the November election, and Dan Scavino, deputy chief of staff for communications, shared a cartoon on his Facebook page depicting Fauci as a faucet flushing the U.S. economy down the drain with overzealous health guidance.
“I respect Dr. Fauci a lot, but Dr. Fauci is not 100 percent right and he also doesn’t necessarily, and he admits that, have the whole national interest in mind,” Adm. Brett Giroir, the administration’s testing czar, added Sunday. “He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”
Still, polling consistently shows the public has more trust in Fauci than Trump when it comes to health guidance during the pandemic, and Fauci has warned that divisive remarks could ultimately undermine the government’s response to the pandemic.
“And you know from experience historically that when you don’t have unanimity in an approach to something, you’re not as effective in how you handle it,” Fauci said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight. “So I think you’d have to make the assumption that if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have a more coordinated approach.”