Donald Trump Lashes Out At Dr. Fauci And Dr. Birx
Former president Donald Trump has hit back at his top COVID-19 advisors in a long tirade, claiming that Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx put "millions of lives at risk."
Both Fauci and Birx criticized the former leader's administration in a CNN documentary that aired on March 28, 2021, per Politico. Fauci opened up about how Trump shocked him with his support of anti-lockdown movements, suggesting that the Republican fueled resistance to social distancing guidelines. Birx also described a "very difficult" and "uncomfortable" phone call with Trump in the early days of COVID-19.
In his response to the CNN interviews, Trump slammed the medical two experts, whose recommendations he repeatedly ignored. "Based on their interviews, I felt it was time to speak up about Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, two self-promoters trying to reinvent history to cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned," the former commander-in-chief stated.
"They had bad policy decisions that would have left our country open to China and others, closed to reopening our economy, and years away from an approved vaccine — putting millions of lives at risk," he went on to claim. But, historically speaking, Trump's perceptions and the facts don't always align.
Trump's attack was called 'revisionist history' by an insider
Donald Trump's rant against his former advisors was full of inaccuracies, as Politico reported. Trump called Dr. Anthony Fauci the "king of flip-flops" for revising his advice as more information came out about the virus. Trump also objected to Fauci's comments about how he helped Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech develop a successful vaccine, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
"We developed American vaccines by an American president in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world," Trump asserted. In fact, the first shot authorized by the FDA was invented by the German company BioNTech, which was founded by Turkish immigrants, according to the Wall Street Journal. Also, Pfizer did not receive funding from the government to manufacture said vaccine.
Trump then claimed that Dr. Deborah Birx is "a proven liar with very little credibility left" in response to her estimate that hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United State "could have been mitigated or decreased substantially" if the former president had changed his approach. "Dr. Birx was a terrible medical advisor, which is why I seldom followed her advice," he insisted.
Even a former official from the White House told Politico that Trump's rant came as a surprise. "Bit of revisionist history from the former president," they commented. "We all had our issues with Fauci and his media marathons but very few people — including President Trump — had anything negative to say about Dr. Birx."