- Despite ongoing tension with President Trump over his handling of the coronavirus, Dr. Fauci has no plans to quit Trump’s coronavirus task force.
- Fauci last month said Trump’s insults were nothing “just noise.”
- Fauci was not listed as a member of President-elect Joe Biden’s recently assembled coronavirus advisory board.
Dr. Anthony Fauci’s relationship with President Trump over the past few months has been contentious, to say the least. While the pair seemingly worked well together during the early days of the pandemic, it wasn’t long before rifts between the two became readily apparent due to opposing views on how to best prevent the coronavirus from spreading. There have even been reports claiming that Trump would have fired Fauci but wanted to avoid the political fallout.
Meanwhile, President-elect Joe Biden recently announced his coronavirus advisory board. And interestingly enough, the board doesn’t include Dr. Fauci. That could certainly change going forward, but Fauci in the interim has no plans to quit Trump’s coronavirus task force.
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“I stay in my lane. I’m not a politician. I do public health things,” Fauci said during a recent interview with Reuters. “There’s absolutely no reason and no sense at all for me to stop doing something in the middle of a pandemic that is playing a major role in helping us get out of the pandemic.”
As it stands now, the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. is worse today than it’s been since this whole saga began. States across the country are seeing a record number of new infections every day and there’s no indication that things are going to get better anytime soon. Across the country, new cases have shot up by 82% over the last two weeks. During the same period, coronavirus-related deaths and hospitalizations are up 40% and 46%, respectively.
Compounding matters is that colder weather is settling in across the country, a fact which drives people indoors where the coronavirus can spread more easily. Additionally, colder and drier air result in coronavirus particles lingering in the air for longer, thus increasing the odds that someone will come into contact with the virus.
Consequently, Dr. Osterholm, a top infectious disease doctor in the U.S., recently said that November through January will be “the darkest of the entire pandemic.” Indeed, Osterholm back in October said that daily new infections could top 75,000 per day by November. As it turns out, the U.S. started seeing upwards of 90,000 new cases per day by late October.
The only good news is that we’ve seen progress on the coronavirus vaccine front. Just this week, Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine was 94.5% effective at preventing the coronavirus. And just a few days prior, Pfizer said its own coronavirus vaccine was 90% effective at preventing the coronavirus. As a result, there is a chance that life in the U.S. could return to normal as early as June of next year.
“If we get the overwhelming majority of people taking the vaccine and you have on the one hand an effective vaccine and a high degree of uptake of the vaccine,” Dr. Fauci recently said, “we could start getting things back to relative normal as we get into the second and third quarter of the year, where people can start doing things that were too dangerous just months ago.”
