Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Trump Slams Fauci As 'Not A Great Doctor, But A Hell Of A Promoter'
Reuters: In Rare Public Outing, Trump Denounces Fauci, China; Dangles 2024 Prospects
Former President Donald Trump on Saturday sharply attacked U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, demanded reparations from China and denounced an investigation into his finances in a speech in North Carolina. Speaking in Greenville, North Carolina, at the state's Republican Party convention, Trump joined a chorus of Republican politicians who are criticizing Fauci for asking Americans to wear masks to guard against the virus and who at times has been skeptical of a theory that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. Trump called Fauci "not a great doctor but a great promoter" for his frequent television appearances. "But he's been wrong on almost every issue and he was wrong on Wuhan and the lab also," Trump said. (Brice, 6/6)
Politico: Trump Reemerges On The Trail And Plays The Hits Of Yore
Trump bragged about his administration’s role in developing the coronavirus vaccine and attacked the Biden administration's foreign policy, energy and immigration policies. “If we had not come up with a vaccine, you would have had 1917 Spanish flu numbers,” Trump said of the virus’ death toll and Operation Warp Speed. The former president attacked infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has become a boogeyman for Trump and the right, as “not a great doctor, but a hell of a promoter.” (McGraw, 6/5)
The Washington Post: Trump Pushes Wuhan Lab Leak Theory And Targets Fauci
Donald Trump and his Republican allies have spent the last few weeks trying to rewrite or distort the history of the pandemic, attempting with renewed vigor to villainize Anthony S. Fauci while lionizing the former president for what they portray as heroic foresight and underappreciated efforts to combat the deadly virus. They have focused on the early moments of the coronavirus response and the origins of the virus, downplaying any role they may have played and casting others in the wrong, at times taking comments out of context and at others drawing conclusions that are unproved. (Viser and Abutaleb, 6/5)
Politico: Attacks On Fauci Grow More Intense, Personal And Conspiratorial
For over a year, Anthony Fauci has been a bogeyman for conservatives, who have questioned his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of quietly undermining then-President Donald Trump. But those attacks took on a whole new level of vitriol this week, to the point that one social media analysis described it as highly misleading and at least one platform pulled down some posts, citing false content. (Korecki and Owermohle, 6/4)
Axios: Fauci Calls Personal Attacks "Distorted" And "Misleading"
NIAID director Anthony Fauci called criticism against him "completely inappropriate, distorted, misleading, and misrepresented attacks." MSNBC's Rachel Maddow asked Biden's chief medical adviser if he worried about being the subject of personal attacks as the public face of the federal government's coronavirus response, but Fauci said he was more concerned about the "attack on science." (Gonzalez, 6/5)
Newsweek: Donald Trump Jr. Accused Of Making Threat Against Anthony Fauci After Sharing Murder Meme
Critics have accused Donald Trump Jr. of issuing threats against Dr. Anthony Fauci after he shared a meme about the infectious disease expert's hypothetical murder on Friday. At around 7 p.m. last night, Trump Jr. shared a meme about Fauci to his 4.5 million followers on Instagram via a story. "I'm gonna just jump out ahead on this and say I don't think Fauci killed himself," read the meme, seen by Newsweek. The words were photoshopped onto a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio drinking a cocktail. (Zhao, 6/5)
In related news about the Trump administration's early response to the coronavirus —
CNBC: Fauci's 2,000 Emails A Day Show How Little U.S. Officials Knew In The Early Days Of The Covid Pandemic
On April 12, 2020, an official at the National Institutes of Health emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, and then CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield fretting about the increasing hostilities between the U.S. and World Health Organization over the coronavirus pandemic. Then President Donald Trump was threatening to withdraw funding from the international health organization for getting “every aspect” of the outbreak wrong. (Breuninger, Lovelace Jr., Feiner, Mendez and Bursztynsky, 6/5)
CBS News: Condoleezza Rice Says Early Dismissal Of Coronavirus Lab Leak Theory Was A "Mistake"
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested public health officials in the United States made a "mistake" in the early weeks of the pandemic by dismissing the possibility that the coronavirus accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. "There was too much of a tendency early on to dismiss this possibility of a laboratory leak, and I think there was a lot, and I think the press bears some responsibility for this," Rice said in an interview with "Face the Nation" that aired Sunday. "'Well, it had to be animal-to-human transmission.' These were conspiracy theories about a laboratory leak. And in fact, some of the evidence was right in front of our faces." (Quinn, 6/6)
