Dr Fauci is going around telling everyone that Trump is the one who screwed up....not him.
That is sure not what Fauci actually said in the interview. I link the whole thing here, not just the snippets CNN wants you to hear. I typed it out, as well. Fauci was defending the complexity of what the administration had to decide:
Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday that calls to implement life-saving social distancing measures faced "a lot of pushback" early in the US coronavirus outbreak and that the country is now looking for ways to more effectively respond to the virus should it rebound in the fall.
www.cnn.com
JAKE TAPPER: South Korea and the US announced their first confirmed cases of the coronavirus at virtually the same time, In late January. If you look where we are right now in the US, the US has 50 times more cases and almost one hundred times more fatalities. While the US makes up only 4.25% of the world population, the US has 30% of the world’s reported cases and almost 20% of the world’s reported deaths. Dr. Sanjay Gupta said that’s all because we got started too late in the US. Is that right? Do you agree?
DR. FAUCI: You know, it isn’t as simple as that, Jake, I’m sorry. To just say this is all happening because we got started too late—obviously, if you had done something earlier could it have had an impact, obviously. But where we are right now is the result of a number of factors. The size of the country, the ___________ of the country. I think it’s a little unfair to compare us to South Korea, where they had an outbreak in Dagu and they had the capability of shutting it off completely in a way that we may not have been able to do.
So obviously, it would have been nice if we’d had a better head start, but I don’t think you can say we are where we are because of one factor. It’s very complicated, Jake.
JAKE TAPPER: The New York Times reported yesterday that you and other top officials wanted to recommend social and physical distancing guidelines to President Trump as far back as the third week in February, but the administration didn’t announce such guidelines to the American public until March 16, almost a month later. Why?
DR. FAUCI: You know, Jake, as I’ve said many times, we look at it from a pure health standpoint; we make a recommendation. Often it’s taken, sometimes it’s not. But it is what it is; we are where we are right now.
JAKE TAPPER: Do you think lives could have been saved if social distancing, physical distancing, , stay at home measures had been started the third week in February instead of mid-March?
DR. FAUCI: You know, Jake, once again it’s the “what would have, what could have” –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, that it could have saved lives. Obviously. No one is going to deny that. But what goes in to those kind of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. If we had right from the very beginning shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.