NIH Director Says White House Now Has ‘Different Priorities’ Than Coronavirus
Dr. Anthony Fauci says President Donald Trump has not attended a coronavirus task force meeting in “several months.” Fauci, the most respected and most recognized health official in the federal government, also says meetings of the task force have been only “about one per week.”
Almost since its inception the task force had been meeting daily, but that dropped done to weekly several weeks ago, Fauci told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. Vice President Mike Pence still leads the group.
Fauci also says, “I definitely don’t have” Trump’s “ear as much as Scott Atlas,” the Fox News radiologist who has all but made “herd immunity” the official policy of this White House.
“Direct involvement with the President,” Fauci said, “I have not done that in a while.”
It is a staggering revelation, as the U.S. heads into what experts are calling America’s “third wave” of the coronavirus pandemic. On Thursday more than 70,000 new coronavirus cases were recorded. The U.S. now has had 8.7 million COVID-19 cases and is rapidly approaching 230,000 deaths.
Meanwhile, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recently called it “a bit of a chaotic time with the election,” noting that “there’s not a direct connection between the task force members and the president as there was a few months ago. But this seems to be a different time with different priorities.”