CNN’s Alisyn Camerota Rips Trump for Criticizing Fauci: ‘Right Wing Media’ Trying to Make Him the ‘Fall Guy’
RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
BERMAN: “‘The New York Times’ put out a report outlining at several different incidences, the president was warned and chose to either ignore or disagree with recommendations about the spread of Coronavirus. Over the weekend, Dr. Anthony Fauci said something which is obvious and should be noncontroversial. If the United States had taken mitigation actions sooner, more lives could have been saved. We woke up this morning, Sanjay, to a tweet from the president, a message on social media, he was highlighting it, retweeting, as we say, with the #fire Fauci. You, as someone deeply concerned about public health, what are your feelings when you see the president highlight that type of message?”
GUPTA: “Well, that’s concerning, obviously. I do talk to Dr. Fauci on a regular basis. I did not speak to him after this happened. One thing I will say is that Dr. Fauci, obviously, a lot of people in the country have gotten to know him over the past few months. People within the public health world, especially within government public service, have known him for 40 years. He’s got a pretty unique position and unique stature there. There isn’t a team of people like Fauci. Fauci is sort of an individual who holds that stature. I mean, there’s people who, like Ambassador Birx, who is well-regarded also. Just got to say, he’s clearly the person who has been leading the charge and been ‘Out front’ on this. Anything can happen, I guess, John. I don’t know if that was sort of a reactionary retweet or what or if it means something more. It’s always hard to tell. It would be a huge loss. Everybody recognizes that in the country right now. The ten tackles of knowledge he has and the context he can give to see around corners with regard to where this is going to go, it’s pretty invaluable now. Most people inside and outside the administration recognize that.”
CAMEROTA: “And just one more thing on the Dr. Fauci thing. Because as I hear him say in that sound bite and read it he’s saying we. He’s not casting blame on anyone else. He is saying we. I mean, he’s saying had we started sooner. You know, I know the right wing media is trying to make him some sort of fall guy because back on January 21st, he didn’t sound the alarm. But he’s saying we. And like John said, it’s not controversial to say that if we all started sooner, things might have been different.”
GUPTA: “Absolutely. He’s using the collective we. It was earlier when he was giving testimony and he talked about the testing at that point and he said, look, that was a failing. I can’t remember the exact quote. But there’s no two ways about it. That was a failing. To me, at that point, that was a much stronger statement. Something that I thought might really ruffle some feathers within the administration, within CDC, within other organizations. That really didn’t seem to cause a ripple effect here. This seems less, to your point Alisyn, of an infraction if you want to call it that than the statement from before. If I can, Alisyn, because you bring up this timeline, I saw your interview with ‘The New York Times’ reporters earlier. We’ve been sort of looking at time lines from a medical standpoint to overlay what’s happening at the White House. If we can take a peek at that. December 31st, 2019, that was when the W.H.O. First informed of this pneumonia cluster of unknown cases. Now, as we know, Alisyn, we talked about this last week, it was probably earlier than that that they knew. Maybe even a month earlier that China knew it was an unusual pneumonia cluster. But it was January 7th they identified the novel Coronavirus. But there’s two dates. I really want you to keep in mind. I think people will look back on these dates. January 30th and 31st. January 30th, new England journal of medicine publishes a paper that there is asymptomatic transmission. That was in kmien. On January 31st, the CDC announces there’s human to human transmission in the United States. Here’s why I bring it up. Up until that point, there was still a question among many in the public health community, look, is this going to be another SARS, which was terrible, but it was 8,000 people around the world, around 800 deaths. Bad disease, but never really spread that far. Or H1N1 which spread very, very far but ended up being not that lethal. What was this going to be? I think up until the end of January, sort of early February when these papers came out, it was sort of like we don’t know. It’s a novel Coronavirus. We’ve had other examples of these sorts of viruses. Who knows where this is going to go exactly. When the human to human, asymptomatic transmissions came out, that was it. Everybody was already worried. But those were the markers. You can start to overlay those on the markers that you guys are talking about in terms of what was happening with the response of that time.”
(via Mediaite)
