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Dr Anthony Fauci was the “picnic skunk” of Donald Trump’s White House coronavirus task force, the leading US public health expert told The New York Times in a candid interview on Sunday.
More than 25 million cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in the United States and nearly 420,000 people have died. The economy has collapsed and the roll-out of vaccines has not gone smoothly. On Sunday, senior officials in the new Biden administration added to criticism of Trump’s response.
Fauci said some people speculated he was “an accomplice in distortions emanating from the scene” during the White House briefings on Covid at the start of the pandemic, which Trump held firm to. He often clashed with the president, but said he never considered stepping down.
“I felt that if I quit,” he said, “it would leave a void. Someone should not be afraid to speak the truth. [White House staff] would try to minimize the real issues and talk a little happily about how things are going. And I was always like, “Wait a minute, wait, guys, this is serious business.” So there was a joke – a friendly joke, you know – that I was the skunk at the picnic.
Trump criticized Fauci and flirted with the firing, but never budged against the highly experienced and highly regarded leader of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has served all presidents since 1984.
Fauci, 80, has previously discussed death threats due to his differences with Trump on topics such as basic social mitigation measures and unproven treatments, including bleach, ultraviolet light and l ‘hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial, all pushed by Trump as the death toll rises.
Fauci is married to Christine Grady, the National Institutes of Health’s top bioethicist. She, he told The Times, “brought up the fact that I might consider leaving.”
“And after a conversation, she finally agreed with me. I’ve always thought that if I walked away, the skunk at the picnic wouldn’t be at the picnic. Even though I wasn’t very good at changing everyone’s minds, the idea that they knew nonsense couldn’t be thrown away without me pushing back into it, I felt important.
“I thought it would be better for the country and for my cause to stay, rather than go away.
Dr Deborah Birx, an army medic known for her work on AIDS who was the coordinator of Trump’s task force, also explained this weekend why she had not left a White House containing “people who definitely believed [Covid] was a hoax ”.
Birx will be retiring soon. Fauci agreed to be Joe Biden’s chief science adviser, a role he said produced a “sense of liberation.” He told The Times he didn’t know how long he would serve the new president, who is only two years his junior.
“You know,” he said, “my whole professional life has been dealing with pandemics… That’s what I do.
“I think what I bring to the table is something that has a lot of added value. I want to keep doing this until I see us crush this epidemic, so people can get back to normal. And even after that, there is still HIV, to which I have devoted most of my professional life.
Finally, Fauci was asked if he thought Trump “had cost the country tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.”
“I can’t comment on that,” he said. “People always ask that and… making the direct connection that way, it gets very overwhelming. I just want to stay away from it. Sorry.”
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