Anthony Fauci did not mince words about what it was like to work for Trump and let Americans die
Anthony Fauci is back in action. The man who served as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to the President under 45’s reign of terror has finally had his gag removed by the Biden administration. Yesterday at a White House briefing, he was finally able to address the nation without that befuddled orange gargoyle leering behind him. Fauci said that working with Biden is "liberating," along with several other refreshingly candid things that imply that he's free at last to lean on science, tell Americans the truth, and fight coronavirus effectively.
“The idea that you can get up here and talk about what you know — what the evidence, what the science is — and know that’s it, let the science speak,” Fauci said. “It is somewhat of a liberating feeling.” We shouldn’t have to rejoice in the fact that the scientist responsible for helping the White House plan and implement strategies to end the pandemic gets to actually use science, but we do.
We haven’t officially heard from Fauci in a minute because Trump preferred to let more Fox News friendly pundits — like Scott Atlas and Deborah Birx — do the talking. In case you forgot, the only time we got real talk about the pandemic from either of those sycophants was when Birx leaked it. In his briefing, Fauci refrained from directly criticizing the former administration, but commented that he sometimes “got in trouble” for being publicly candid in ways that Trump didn’t approve of.
“I take no pleasure at all in being in a situation of contradicting the president, so it was really something that you didn’t feel that you could actually say something and there wouldn’t be any repercussions about it,” he said. In case you don’t remember, Trump basically threatened to fire Fauci for disagreeing with him. Do I need to note that muzzling medical experts is a classic authoritarian move?
Hopefully, Biden removing Fauci’s gage will also address the problem of the constantly changing information — and sometimes conflicting messaging — from the White House we’ve all struggled to decode in the past year. Yes, Fauci has been part of the problem, but as he intimated yesterday, he felt pressure to come up with answers about the pandemic even if he wasn’t sure, which led to a lot of flip flopping. “One of the new things about this new administration: if you don’t know the answer, don’t guess,” Fauci said.
