Anthony Fauci has described his trepidation ahead of the press conference when then-President Donald Trump suggested injecting disinfectant to battle Covid-19.
The chief medical adviser to the president and the director of the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases since 1984 spoke to ABC News ahead of his retirement from government service at the end of 2022.
“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that?” Mr Trump said in the White House briefing room on 23 April 2020.
“Where were you when President Trump floated the idea of injecting disinfectant?” ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Dr Fauci.
“I was at the White House, yes. I didn’t want to go up on there with this because I had a bad feeling about when Homeland Security brought this guy in, he briefed the people in the Situation Room beforehand. And as soon as I heard it, I said, holy s***, this is going to go bad. Why don’t I bow out of this one?” Dr Fauci said.
“What would you have done if you had been standing by the president when he said that?” Karl pressed.
“Well, I would have to had said, hey, I would have done this,” Dr Fauci said, indicating the hand sign for a time-out.
“When did it all get so political?” Karl asked.
“It got political very, very quickly,” Dr Fauci said. “Because we had the misfortune of an outbreak, and a double misfortune of an outbreak in a divided society, and the triple misfortune of a divided society in an election year. I mean, you couldn’t get more... getting the cards stacked against you, than right there. It was a triple whammy.”
“I look upon the country, in many respects, as my patient,” Dr Fauci told ABC. “And ... if you’re a really good physician, you are concerned and worry about every element of your patient.”
“Including how your patient is going to react to something you said?” Karl asked.
“Exactly. And even if the patient is somebody who’s not the most attractive person in the world in the sense of personality, you still got to treat them the way you would treat anybody else. We learned that in medical school,” Dr Fauci said.
“I think the misconception is that I was misleading people,” Dr Fauci told ABC. “You know, to say that I, who have been an adviser to seven presidents, and have never ever veered one way or the other from an ideological standpoint, and for somebody to say that I’m ... political, I mean that’s completely crazy.”
Karl also noted that Dr Fauci “became an icon”.
“It was kind of wild to see. There were Fauci bobbleheads. People had Fauci shirts that said ‘In Fauci We Trust.’ You became somebody the whole country was turning to. What was that like?” the journalist asked.
“I was pretty well known among my peers in science, but certainly not to the extent it is now,” Dr Fauci said. “You know, I actually think both extremes ... are aberrations of a reflection of the divisiveness in our country.”
