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Post by Admin on Mar 30, 2020 19:10:54 GMT
During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, many Americans panicked when a US nurse was infected by a patient she was caring for, a traveller from West Africa. Ebola can cause deadly bleeding. Fauci confronted those fears by setting a personal example. When the NIH hospital released that nurse, not only did he say she was not contagious, he gave her a hug before TV cameras to prove he was not worried. Correcting Trump Fast-forward six years, and Fauci is again at the forefront of scientists' efforts to dispel misinformation and explain the coronavirus pandemic, even when it means being at odds with the president. Fauci uses a metaphor from one of the fastest-moving sports to describe his strategy on the outbreak. "You skate not to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going to be," he told a House committee. He has simultaneously advocated containment to try to keep the virus from spreading, mitigation to check its damage once it gets loose in a community, immediate efforts to increase testing, and short-term and long-term science to develop treatments and vaccines. He is hoping a dynamic response will put the nation where the puck ends up going. "It's unpredictable," he said. "Testing now is not going to tell you how many cases you're going to have. What will tell you ... will be how you respond to it with containment and mitigation." Over the weekend, Fauci told CNN that the pandemic could ultimately kill between 100,000 and 200,000 people in the US should mitigation be unsuccessful. Serving a president who initially dismissed coronavirus by comparing it to seasonal flu, Fauci has been even-handed in public. He has won the respect of Democratic and Republican legislators, along with Trump administration officials. Almost in a matter-of-fact fashion, Fauci acknowledged to Congress earlier this month that the government system was not designed for mass testing of potential infections. "It is a failing, let's admit it," he told legislators. When asked about Trump's comments on an anti-malaria drug that he said could be a "game-changer" in the race to find a coronavirus treatment, Fauci, standing next to the president, said there was not scientific data to support the use of the drug. Fauci's candour has not stopped Trump from praising him. "Tony has been doing a tremendous job working long, long hours," earlier this month, as rumours swirled that there was a division between Fauci and the White House. For Fauci's part, he has said he that while the pair disagree on some things, there is no division.
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Post by Admin on Mar 30, 2020 21:33:22 GMT
In a new interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Dr. Anthony Fauci opened up about the unique challenges of serving on President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases called it “kind of funny but understandable that people said, ‘What the hell’s the matter with Fauci?’ because I had been walking a fine line.”
“I’ve been telling the president things he doesn’t want to hear. I have publicly had to say something different with what he states,” he continued, explaining that he’s engaged in “risky business” but insisting that Trump is not and has not been “pissed off” at him to date.
“I don’t want to embarrass him,” Fauci added. “I don’t want to act like a tough guy, like I stood up to the president. I just want to get the facts out. And instead of saying, ‘You’re wrong,’ all you need to do is continually talk about what the data are and what the evidence is. And he gets that. He’s a smart guy. He’s not a dummy. So he doesn’t take it—certainly up to now—he doesn’t take it in a way that I’m confronting him in any way. He takes it in a good way.”
As recently as this past Friday, Dr. Fauci had to publicly tamp down expectations for the anti-malarial drug that Trump has been touting as a miracle cure for COVID-19.
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Post by Admin on Mar 31, 2020 0:05:37 GMT
At a White House briefing on the coronavirus March 20, President Donald Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.
Some thought Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people.
A week later, Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president.
That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Trump’s supporters, even as Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.
An analysis by The New York Times found more than 70 accounts on Twitter that have promoted the hashtag #FauciFraud, with some tweeting as frequently as 795 times a day. The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.
Many of the anti-Fauci posts, some of which pointed to a seven-year-old email that the doctor had sent praising Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, have been retweeted thousands of times. On YouTube, conspiracy-theory videos about Fauci have racked up hundreds of thousands of views in the past week. In private Facebook groups, posts disparaging him have also been shared hundreds of times and liked by thousands of people, according to the Times analysis.
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Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2020 6:13:12 GMT
The man who has become the voice of reason and science from the daily White House coronavirus briefings was positively circumspect today about a declaration from one of the Pandemic physicians of a possible COVID-19 vaccine. “I don’t know this specific individual, what they’re doing, but I can tell you there’s a lot of activity that is centered around a passive transfer of antibodies in the form of convalescent plasma,” Dr. Anthony Fauci replied to the front row question this afternoon from Fox News’ John Roberts about the widely covered claims by Dr. Jacob Glanville, who seen in the first season of the recently released Netflix series. http://instagram.com/p/B-dJw11BE4K “This is an old concept,” the long serving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases added of the Distributed Bio CEO’s efforts to mutate a series of antibodies that were successful in combating the SARS outbreak nearly 20 years ago. “In fact, immunology was born decades and decades ago with the concept of giving passive transfer of serum to an individual to protect them from infection,” the media savvy Fauci noted as President Donald Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence stood behind him on Tuesday in the Executive Mansion. “So, I wouldn’t be surprised if he and a number of other people are pursing this. It’s the right thing to do.” Certainly it is a timely thing to do as confirmed cases of COVID-19 move closer to 1 million globally and have seen over 40,000 deaths, according to the WHO. Featured in the six-episode January 22 launching Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak docuseries, Golden State based Glanville told a New Zealand radio show today that “we’ve evolved them in our laboratory, so now they very vigorously block and stop the SARS-CoV-2 [COVID-19] virus as well.” Earlier, with the caveat that his fast-acting potential vaccine of sorts will only protect people for 8 to 10 weeks, bioengineer and computational immunologist Dr. Glanville had tweeted out some of the science at play:
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Post by Admin on Apr 6, 2020 17:52:05 GMT
President Donald Trump said Sunday the U.S. had stockpiled 29 million pills of an anti-malaria drug he’s repeatedly pushed as a potential treatment for COVID-19, despite persistent warnings from the nation’s top infectious disease expert there is no “strong” evidence yet the medication could help rein in the ongoing pandemic.
“What do you have to lose?” Trump asked several times during a briefing at the White House, later saying: “I want them to try it, and it may work and it may not work. But if it doesn’t work, there is nothing lost by doing it. What I want is to save lives, but I don’t want it to be in a lab for a year and a half.”
He added: “I’m not acting as a doctor, I’m saying do what you want, but there are some good signs.”
The comments add to Trump’s growing persistence that hydroxychloroquine, an FDA-approved malaria prevention drug, could help save American lives as infection rates in the country topped 337,000. More than 9,600 people have died.
But the president’s hopeful claims about the drug go against the advice of many doctors, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, who leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci has repeatedly and aggressively thrown water on the idea in recent days. He told CBS on Sunday we can’t “definitively say it works,” calling data thus far merely “suggestive.”
In an interview with Fox News a day before, he said the country had to be “careful that we don’t make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug.”
And during the press conference on Sunday, he said the country’s best hope right now to rein in the spread of the virus was simply “mitigation, mitigation, mitigation,” referring to social distancing measures and frequent hand-washing.
When a reporter attempted to ask Fauci about the president’s claims on Sunday, Trump refused to let him answer, saying the doctor had already done so “15 times.”
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