Dr Anthony Fauci appeared to dismiss comparing US President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump on Covid when asked to do so, and instead laughed.
Speaking in an interview on Tuesday, the chief medical adviser to the US president suggested it was not worth making a comparison between the two administrations.
“Peter, you know the answer to that,” Dr Fauci told Peter Nichols of The Atlantic’s , while making a “long hard laugh” after being questioned on what differed between Mr Biden and former US president Trump on Covid.
“When you look at it historically, there were many aspects of what came out of the Trump-administration response that really were not aligned with scientific principles,” he alleged. “There are very good examples of that”.
Dr Fauci, apparently referring to Mr Trump’s support for scientifically unproven Covid treatments, said the the Trump administration’s approach included “claiming that certain interventions worked when it was only anecdotal [and] listening to people who had no experience in public health”.
That included support for unproven Covid treatments such as transferring blood plasma, sunlight and Hydroxychloroquine – a bleach solution that is unsafe for human consumption. As did Mr Trump hire an adviser without any experience in infectious diseases, Dr Scott Atlas.
Dr Fauci added that there were also “contradictory statements”, including when Mr Trump tweeted in support of protests against stay-at-home orders in two Democrat states.
“There were contradictory statements,” Dr Fauci said, “like when [the former Covid-19 response coordinator] Debbie Birx and I spent a lot of time putting together a programme of how we can slow the spread and the next day the president comes out and says, ‘Liberate Michigan; liberate Virginia.’”
“Those are not things that are productive in getting control of an outbreak.”
The former president also faced accusations of failing to introduce tougher public health measures when necessary in 2020, and of not wearing a face mask months into the pandemic – and in spite of advice issued by his own government and figure including Dr Fauci.
Mr Trump and Dr Fauci increasingly disagreed on how to combat Covid, with figures on the right continuing to attack the US president’s chief medical adviser.
It comes as president Biden on Tuesday night addressed the nation with a call for millions of Americans to get vaccinated or boosted against Covid after 800,000 deaths in the US alone, and which he said was a “patriotic duty”.
He also acknowledged the Trump administration’s work on researching and funding Covid vaccines, in what was an apparent attempt at persuading vaccine hesitant Americans on the right to protect themselves and others from the disease.
