6/18/20
The White House coronavirus task force has been out of public view as President Donald Trump has shown an urgency to move past the pandemic, downplay recent surges in Covid cases in some states, and get Americans back to work. But the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been warning Americans about the risk of further spread of the virus. On Wednesday, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, joined the US Department of Health and Human Services' podcast "Learning Curve" and gave his expertise on the pandemic and the vaccine development process. He also defended the stay-at-home orders as having saved "millions of lives," and drew attention to anti-science bias and the disproportionate impact the virus is having on the black community. Fauci said "anti-science bias" in the country can be problematic. "One of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias that people are -- for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable -- they just don't believe science and they don't believe authority," Fauci said.
"So when they see someone up in the White House, which has an air of authority to it, who's talking about science, that there are some people who just don't believe that -- and that's unfortunate because, you know, science is truth," Fauci said. "It's amazing sometimes the denial there is. It's the same thing that gets people who are anti-vaxxers, who don't want people to get vaccinated, even though the data clearly indicate the safety of vaccines," Fauci added. "That's really a problem." Trump has frequently disregarded expert advice -- and often the guidance of his own administration -- during the pandemic. if you look at the data, now that papers have come out literally two days ago, the fact that we shut down when we did and the rest of the world did, has saved hundreds of millions of infections and millions of lives," Fauci said. "And yet, there are those who say, 'You shut down, you did destructive things by disrupting the economy.' And others say, 'Well, if you save so many infections by shutting down, why didn't you shut down two weeks earlier? You could have saved many more lives.'"