Trump slams Birx, Fauci following critical CNN coronavirus report

A furious Donald Trump blasted his onetime White House coronavirus top doctors a day after they fried the former president on a CNN special, saying both were leading the country into a COVID “depression.”

Both Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump said, were “self-promoters trying to reinvent history” and didn’t embrace banning flights from China and then banking on new vaccines. The former president never mentions CNN by name.

“Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx moved far too slowly, and if it were up to them we’d currently be locked in our basements as our country suffered through a financial depression,” Trump wrote Monday night from his 45 Office email feed. “Families, and children in particular, would be suffering the mental strains of this disaster like never before.”

In the most damning exchange on Sunday’s CNN special, Birx said coronavirus deaths in the nation — beyond the first 100,000 — were avoidable.

“The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge. All of the rest of them, in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially,” Birx said on CNN.

As of Monday evening, the Johns Hopkins University pandemic map of the world lists nearly 550,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. — the most anywhere — and almost 2.8 million worldwide.

Trump said both Fauci and Birx went on CNN to “cover for their bad instincts and faulty recommendations, which I fortunately almost always overturned.”

He said “Operation Warp Speed,” that has hustled out life-saving coronavirus vaccines from Cambridge-based Moderna and others from Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, has quieted all naysayers.

“We developed American vaccines by an American President in record time, nine months, which is saving the entire world,” Trump wrote. “We bought billions of dollars of these vaccines on a calculated bet that they would work, perhaps the most important bet in the history of the world.”

To date, about a third of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of the three vaccines — Johnson & Johnson is a one-dose vax.

Trump’s team, however, told of infighting and politicking they say sent dangerous mixed messages to the nation.

Trump has pushed back with a vengeance.

“Dr. Fauci was incapable of pressing the FDA to move (vaccines) through faster. I was the one to get it done, and even the fake news media knows and reports this,” Trump said.

“Dr. Fauci is also the king of ‘flip-flops’ and moving the goalposts to make himself look as good as possible,” he added.

Trump called Birx a “liar with very little credibility left,” adding she was taking the U.S. into a “COVID caused depression.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3w87mFT