Trump Dismisses Latest Fauci Warning About Pandemic: ‘I Think We Are in a Good Place, I Disagree With Him’

This week Dr. Anthony Fauci said that the state of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States is “really not good.”

In a conversation with NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, Fauci said “we’re still knee-deep in the first wave of this” and noted, “The European Union as an entity, it went up and then came down to baseline. Now they’re having little blips, as you might expect, as they try to reopen. We went up, never came down to baseline, and now we’re surging back up.”

Greta Van Susteren interviewed President Donald Trump for her program Full Court Press and asked about both good signs and ongoing concerns about the pandemic.

“Even Dr. Fauci is saying that we’re ‘knee-deep,’ and he’s saying that we’re not in a very good place or something to that effect,” she said. “How do we reconcile the good news with the bad news?”

“Well I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him,” Trump answered. “Dr. Fauci said don’t wear masks, now he says wear them.”

In an interview last month, Fauci was asked why Americans were initially advised against wearing masks before the recommendation that everyone should in fact be doing so. Fauci said it was out of concern that PPE was in short supply, adding, “Now we have masks. We know that you don’t need an N95 if you’re an ordinary person in the street. We also know that simple cloth coverings that many people have can work as well as a mask in many cases… So even though there appears to be some contradiction of ‘You were saying this then, why are you saying this now,’ actually, the circumstances have changed, that’s the reason why.”

Trump added, “He said numerous things. ‘Don’t close off China, don’t ban China.’ And I did it anyway… We would have been in much worse shape. You wouldn’t believe the number of deaths more we would have had if we didn’t do the ban.”

He told Van Susteren he believes “we’re going to be in good shape very soon.”

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