He is the US scientist who became the figurehead of attempts to combat the country’s coronavirus epidemic, described in some quarters as “America’s doctor”.
Now Anthony Fauci appears sidelined by Donald Trump’s White House after repeatedly contradicting the president’s view about the effectiveness of the government response.
In recent days the 79-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has come under increasing fire from the president and his proxies. Trump told Fox news interviewers that Fauci had “made a lot of mistakes” and said he “disagreed” with Fauci’s claim that the US was in a bad place in its coronavirus response.
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Described as driven and a workaholic, Fauci had found himself in the uncomfortable position of gently correcting Trump’s false or misleading statements for months. As far back as April the president retweeted a call for him to be fired, although that threat appeared to have receded.
In any case, Trump cannot fire Fauci, who enjoys support on both sides of Congress and has a public approval rating for his coronavirus response of 67% – almost three times that of Trump’s. Instead the strategy appears aimed at damaging his standing while keeping him out of the public eye by cancelling media appearances.
In the latest salvo of a coordinated briefing campaign, a White House official told CNN on Saturday that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr Fauci has been wrong on things”.
Fauci, who has diplomatically navigated Trump’s often chaotic and sometimes bizarre response to the pandemic, has long been the target of pro-Trump rightwing media in the US, where he has been denounced as “Dr Doom” or accused of being leftwing.
And having originally been a prominent fixture of Trump’s coronavirus press conferences, he is now markedly less visible.
His influence on the White House too appears to be waning. According to the Washington Post, quoting an unnamed White House official, Fauci last briefed Trump in the first week of June.
Fauci has had a long career in public health, and first came to prominence during the Aids crisis. In recent weeks he has baldly contradicted Trump’s assessments that the US is winning the fight against coronavirus, and criticised the partisan political atmosphere that he suggests has impeded the response.
In an interview for a podcast hosted by the FiveThirtyEight website last week he delivered a damning assessment of the United States’s response to the pandemic in comparison to other countries.
Conceding that some cities and states such as New York had responded better than others, Fauci said: “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.” He added that it was “understandable” why the European Union and others had banned US citizens from entering.
On the role of America’s toxic political climate, he said: “You have to be having blind-folders on and covering your ears to think that we don’t live in a very divisive society now, from a political standpoint … 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.”
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