The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Trump and Fauci’s conspicuous non-denial denials about early coronavirus warnings

Analysis by
Staff writer
April 14, 2020 at 1:30 p.m. EDT
The tension between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony S. Fauci and President Trump has been simmering for weeks. (Video: The Washington Post, Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

After 24 hours of tension, President Trump and infectious-disease specialist Anthony S. Fauci presented a united front at a coronavirus briefing on Monday. And in doing so, they appeared to cast doubt on a New York Times report that set off the whole thing, including Trump retweeting a call for Fauci’s firing.

What they didn’t do, though, was actually dispute the reporting.

The source of the tempest was a Times report that had said health officials concluded in the third week of February that they needed increased mitigation efforts to stop the spread of the virus. Trump didn’t wind up taking that step until nearly a month later, on March 16.

In response to the story, Trump on Sunday night retweeted a false allegation against Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The tweet said Fauci had said in late February that Americans had nothing to worry about from the virus — the implication being that health officials couldn’t have made such a conclusion about mitigation in the weeks before because Fauci was still minimizing the risk. (Fauci didn’t actually say that, though.)

Early in Monday’s briefing, Trump set aside his usual lengthy prologue to allow Fauci to clear the air. Fauci proceeded to deal obliquely with comments he had made the previous morning on CNN and then turned to the Times report.

“The first and only time that Dr. [Deborah] Birx and I went in and formally made a recommendation to the president to actually have a, quote, shutdown — in the sense of not really shutdown but to really have strong mitigation … the president listened to the recommendation and went to the mitigation,” he said.

Fauci said he didn’t know the date, but he suggested that Trump acted relatively quickly in approving the guidelines on March 16.

Fauci then said that he and Birx again recommended extending the guidelines after the initial 15-day period was up, and Trump agreed, pushing them out an additional 30 days.

The impression left is that the Times report about a February conclusion may have been faulty. But if you look closely at what was reported, Fauci’s version isn’t at all contradictory. Here’s what the Times reported Sunday:

By the third week in February, the administration’s top public health experts concluded they should recommend to Mr. Trump a new approach that would include warning the American people of the risks and urging steps like social distancing and staying home from work. But the White House focused instead on messaging, and crucial additional weeks went by before their views were reluctantly accepted by the president — time when the virus spread largely unimpeded.

The paragraph summarized a report from the day before by the Times’s Eric Lipton, in which he obtained emails that backed up the account.

But — importantly — the report also made clear that the recommendation wasn’t actually made to Trump. That’s because a top health official offered the kind of warning that other officials had desired and Trump reacted negatively:

[Department of Health and Human Services official] Dr. [Robert] Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day [Feb. 24] to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.

This appears to refer to a statement made on Feb. 25 by Nancy Messonnier, an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that the spread of the coronavirus was “inevitable” in the United States. In other words, the health officials came to the conclusion that mitigation was needed, but they backed off their planned recommendation after Trump made his feelings about such warnings abundantly clear.

It’s also important to note that the Times report wasn’t about Fauci and Birx specifically, but about other health officials. So Fauci saying that the first formal recommendation came later than this is completely consistent with the report. (It’s also worth parsing the fact that Fauci referred to “formally” making the recommendation, which could be read to suggest there were less formal suggestions earlier on.)

Neither did Trump technically dispute the report on Monday. Pressed on his lack of action in February, he repeatedly pointed to shutting down travel from China in January. He also propped up a straw man, saying it would have been crazy to shut down the economy in January, when there were very few or no cases. In fact, there is no documented call for such a shutdown in January; the Times report says this conclusion was reached in mid-February.

“But how do you close up the United States of America? So, on January 6, no deaths. On January 11, no deaths, and no — no cases on January 17, no cases — no cases, no deaths,” Trump said. “I’m supposed to close up the United States of America when I have no cases?”

He added later: “How do you close down the greatest economy in the history of the world when, on January 17, you have no cases and no death?”

Again, nobody was suggesting as much. Trump was disputing something that hasn’t been alleged.

As The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted Monday, Trump’s chosen timeline here is conspicuous. Even the propagandistic video played at the briefing Monday skipped over nearly an entire month between early February and early March. That period is when health officials’ concerns were truly starting to register, according to the Times report, but Trump was so focused on playing down the threat that they concluded it wasn’t even worth making their planned recommendation.

Whether they should have is a valid question, and Trump certainly isn’t the only one here whose actions deserve scrutiny. But the briefing Monday didn’t do anything to dispute that what health officials had decided was necessary in mid-February wasn’t turned into actual policy until mid-March.

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