Fauci Blames Trump for Covid Deaths in Chris Wallace Interview; Won’t Say How Many Because If ‘You Do, It’s a Headline’

Dr. Anthony Fauci singled out former President Donald Trump when CNN+ host Chris Wallace asked if “smarter” government could have prevented Covid deaths.

Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Chief Medical Advisor to the President, was Wallace’s guest on the latest episode of the CNN+ series Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?

During the interview, Wallace asked Dr. Fauci about the death toll, which is nearing 1 million in the United States. He asked Fauci “if the government had been smarter right from the start, in March of 2020 in dealing with this less, and I would say over the course of the two years, both under President Trump and to some degree, under President Biden, less politics, more public health, could we have had a lot fewer deaths?”

Fauci cited Trump tweets that whipped up opposition to locking down at the time and said it contributed to more deaths, but when Wallace pressed, declined to say how many:

FAUCI: I believe so. I believe so. I mean, I can’t quantitate it for you about how many less deaths. You can’t even model that, I don’t think. But there were certain things that were done that if they were done differently, we likely would have had… For example, when we were trying to lock down, if you use that word, that’s a very charged word for some people. Remember, when we were trying to get the 15 day and then the 30 day extension during the Trump administration, and yet he was coming out, right after we came out and I said, with Dr. Birx, let’s do the 15-30 day, he would get up and say, you know, “Liberate Virginia, liberate Michigan,” which was just completely contrary and antithetical with what we were trying to do. But if we had really locked down, we probably wouldn’t have lost a lot of people early on, but we would still… and in fairness to all the parties involved, be at the Trump administration and the Biden administration, when you get a virus as nasty as this, you’re going to lose a lot of people, no matter how good you are…

WALLACE: Do you think that we might have avoided, that there were hundreds of thousands of deaths that were preventable?

FAUCI: Again, it’s really tough, Chris, to quantitate it because you do, it’s a headline, and I don’t want to do that.

WALLACE: Well, we don’t want that either. God forbid, on CNN Plus, that we would look for headlines.

Watch above via CNN+.