Fauci says he and Birx had ‘bad cop’, ‘good cop’ roles in Trump coronavirus task force

Top expert in infectious diseases Anthony FauciAnthony FauciSunday shows preview: Spotlight on Georgia Voting Law; lawmakers tackle gun violence and rising borders Hundreds of thousands of deaths averted with COVID vaccines Bill Gates predicts world will be ‘back to normal’ by end of 2022 MORE he and the former White House coronavirus coordinator said in an interview broadcast on Sunday Deborah BirxDeborah BirxBirx says COVID-19 death toll ‘could have been mitigated’ Trump says Fauci ‘a promoter more than anything’ Birx: Trump’s disinfectant injection timing was ‘extraordinarily uncomfortable’ MORE assumed the roles of “bad cop” and “good cop” respectively within the former President TrumpDonald Trump Biden’s prediction of Afghanistan pullout raises X-factor doubts in race for Virginia Governor Trump says he will likely travel to southern border soon MORECOVID-19 Working Group.

CNN’s Sanjay Gupta asked Fauci in a CNN special report if he and Birx had “a strategy” for responding to the coronavirus pandemic, asking if either of them was the “right cop”, while the the other was the “bad cop.”

“I was the wrong cop,” Fauci replied. “She was the right cop.

“They called me as I often say the skunk at the picnic because every time they said things were going well I would say… I don’t really think so,” Fauci continued.

But the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) admitted that it was “easy for me to say this out loud” thanks to his support for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Fauci said Birx “was in a much more difficult situation”.

“She had an office right there in the West Wing,” Fauci said. “So I’m very, very reluctant to condemn anything – even though there are people who think she should have pushed more, she probably should have.

“But boy, she did a lot of good,” he added. “She knocked herself out on waking up at 3 a.m. collating this data by presenting it every day.”

Gupta asked Fauci and Birx, as well as other federal health officials, about the United States’ pandemic response last year under the Trump administration.

Since last year, the United States has documented more than 30.2 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 549,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.